


In Your Love, My Salvation Lies.

by Gevar



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Mind Manipulation, Post-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Post-X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), Sibling Incest, Twincest, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-02
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-01-01 03:14:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 10
Words: 26,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18327482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gevar/pseuds/Gevar
Summary: Wanda scours hundreds upon hundreds of universes to gain her missing half.--Peter runs from nightmares, into dreams with a hole in his heart.





	1. Do Maximoff Dreams Of Electric Twins?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wanda settles into bed.
> 
> \--
> 
> Peter runs. And smiles.

Wanda settles into bed. Decked in a decrepit nightgown with its flimsy hemline tattered, holed in odd random patterns and Pietro’s musk lingered on its elaborately laced neckline. Her gift acquired by shimmering misty silver-blue trails darting through ruined wreckages. It is—was, is, was—his favourite. Now it’s hers.

Wanda drifts to into the seemingly infinite static echelon and screeching white noise. She walks, blind and deaf. The universe is a peculiar thing. It is black, tinted with specks of dust sparklingly dull like blood diamonds.

She could hear a hummingbird’s rapid heartbeat calling her like a half-starved siren. Wanda feels it deep in her marrows, pulsating faster, clumsily harder, reeling her in. Wanda walks.

She sees a flashing light at the phantomic horizon. Her lighthouse of sorts. Eloquently silver and tall, against the stark obsidian.

Wanda traipses, intimately fluent, along scarlet-brick road fashioned out of flickering celadon will-o’-wisps.

* * *

Peter runs. And the world grinds to a slow crawl.

A hotdog vender slaps mustard on the sausage. Apples tumbling from the paper bag distracts a mother. Her curly-haired son aims his plastic nerf gun at a perplexed terrier. A car swerves, veering off the road, heads for them.

Peter scoops the boy and his dog first, dumps them across the road. His mother and her bag of apples are next. Peter pushes the vendor and his cart further along the curb, away from possible impact. He plucks the freaked-out driver last, sets her down next to the vendor.

(It’s intoxicating to know he’s got enough time to save people, enough to have fun, enough time to evade unnecessary danger.)

Peter runs. And smiles.

He lifts a popsicle. No one would notice. Another day, several lives continually living in ignorant bliss. He deserves it—not blindly stealing for the thrill.

(There’s always enough— _more_ than enough—time to know he has the chance to make a difference.)

Peter runs. The world catches up on him.

A car passes him by, with its measly engine coughing up puffs of smokes. Tailing behind the car, is a speeding motorcycle and its malfunctioned brakes, crashing into the car. A Dobermann outruns him, rapidly eyeing a scrawny cat. Ferocious fangs sink into the feline’s throat. To his left, a bullet punctures a girl’s chest, nicks her ribs and a boy snarls, fires his gun once more.

He cannot see the beat of a honey bee’s translucent wings. He adds more speed to his legs. Still, his footwork is not lightning-quick.

The picturesque cul-de-sac neighbourhood melts into crumbling rubbles of charred flesh, sand-crusted graves and exposed rusting steel, stretching for miles and miles. No, no, no. Not _this_ again.

An ancient cobalt-skinned demon twists, and twists, and twists Peter’s arm until it pops off from its socket. Peter screams. He is voiceless.

Peter runs—tries to.

He’s trapped, half-swallowed by the hardened earth. The demon stomps—shatters his leg into a thousand bone shards, exploding into his flesh. Fat grubby azure fingers violently tugging his hair, searing pain into his scalp, exposes his neck.

“End him,” En Sabah Nur monotonously utters.

This time, Psylocke’s katana slices his throat open.


	2. Night Terrors and Repeated Questions.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wanda peeks into his mind. Sees disjointed dreams, stitched gauchely with aramid threads of night terrors.
> 
> \--
> 
> Peter searches his mind for a flicker of something. Anything. He thinks he might has unpleasant dreams. But nothing.

Wanda senses him instantly. Automatic even. But, takes a minute to wallow in the rhythmic breaths echoing against granite walls. Wanda sits on the edge of his bed; it barely dips under her weight.

He sleeps. But his nimble mind is restless.

Wanda peeks into his mind. Sees disjointed dreams, stitched gauchely with aramid threads of night terrors. Sees the swirling panic seeps into his constricted chest. Sees the crippling dread spills into once-broken bones. Sees a blue-faced monster looming over him.

The bed terribly shakes, as he rapidly vibrates, his muscles locked in spastic fear.

Wanda seen this before.

(On a body ravaged by poverty and war-torn skies. On a perpetually paranoid boy slept with one teal eye open. The nightmares don’t stop even when bodies are reborn with spectacular gifts.)

She does as she always has.

Wanda brushes silver bangs off from his damp forehead. Summons her scarlet, pushes her power into his mind. She dulls the jagged edges of his terrors, drapes the threads in soothing scarlet. Wanda whispers placatingly, “They cannot hurt you now.”

He’s a light sleeper, this one. Like her Pietro.

He doesn’t leap out from his bed. He doesn’t run. Abruptly pulls the blanket over his bare chest instead. It’s an improvement, Wanda supposes.

“Who are you? What are you doing here in my room?” tumbles out from his mouth in a rush. A barrage of familiar questions, if not, identical the ones his lips uttered before.

“I’m here for you,” is all Wanda manages, before he effortlessly interrupts her.

His mind is a racetrack of thoughts and emotions, coloured in crimson panic and casual intrigue.

“For me? Are you gonna kidnap me? I’m too fast for you, or anyone. But seriously though, you don’t want to kidnap me. It’s not gonna end well for you—”

“I miss you.”

She coils her scarlet around his mind, circling each alarmed thought and binds it to her will. Wanda rubs his original thoughts, smoothing and sculpting them into her wishes—her commands.

“I miss you too,” he blurts out, scratching his chin. His eyes, doe-like, are impossibly wide and dazed.

“Take me,” she murmurs.

She never has to compose such a forceful and tasteless seduction. Her beauty rarely catches the eyes of others—too gaunt, too eerie; and a thousand times too forbidding. She knows. She’d seen the looks of many cast in her direction. (Even the Avengers.)

But her Pietro only see galaxies written on her. Kisses her like she’s a Grecian statue worth worshipping.

This Pietro has yet to reach that starry-eyed gaze. Yet he is ever so pliant under her touches. So eager to please. With a little encouragement. And a little weaving scarlet. He’s on his way, though.

“Okay,” he whispers, edgy-tipped nerves practically glowing.

He catches her cheekbones between his clumsy delicate palms, and kisses her with his enthusiastic, puckish lips. His kisses are a dichotomous conundrum. Peculiar but familiar. Still, she’s not here for a stranger’s kiss or touch.

It’s appallingly easy to mould this Pietro into hers. Shifting his impatient hands into spine-tingling caresses. Shaping his fervently messy mouth into shivering euphoric kisses. She leaves his speed intact. His is faster, his is faster—and much, much better.

Nightgown, boxers and blanket are carelessly scattered on the psychedelic carpet, like banners torn down by the shockwaves of a fallen bomb. She’s struck by the neediness creeping into her fingernails drawing crescents along his spine.

This Pietro tastes of blinding optimism, leaving the mango flavour of Capri sun on her tongue. And her teeth mark his throat with berry-shaped lips. Permits herself the chance to immerse wholly into this collision of two bodies (two souls—one soul).

Afterwards, Wanda untangles herself from his embrace. Slips back into the nightgown she casually discarded.

He’s in his boxers and a fresh pair of Queen’s tee, resumes his questioning without missing a beat. “So, sex was _freakin’_ fantastic, but you still haven’t answer me? What’s your name? I’m good with names—”

“Sit,” she says, releasing scarlet energy crowding around him.

“You must have a pretty name,” he slurs, and confusion settles on his eyelids. He obeys, taking the empty space beside her.

Wanda cups his face in her calloused hands, leans forward and presses a chaste kiss on his left cheek. “Sleep well now.” She distorts tonight’s encounter into a hazy-tinted reverie, in a sea of insignificant hallucinatory dreams.

Wanda leaves, walking back into the scarlet brick road.

* * *

“Peter, wake up. We are going to be late for Dr. McCoy’s class,” follows a three-fingered pitiful poke to his face.

Peter cracks one eye open. Kurt’s face is comically looming and inches away from his own. Woah. “Too close, personal space, man—”

It’s instinctive. The world slackens down for a startled Peter. He rolls, and stumbles out from his bed, landing flat on his back.

He spends a fraction of milli-second, thinking. Eyes partially frozen Kurt and his blue brows knotted together in amused glee. The new Peter shows up on time. Old Peter preferred enacting truancy, like he’s a rebel without a cause.

He sighs. Not unkindly.

First stop, shower. Second, clothes. Third, goggles, walkman and headphones. Making imaginary lists keeps him from getting side-tracked by other shinier things.

Peter darts to the common shower, towel in hand. Wait. He went to bed, shirtless. Not the Queen’s tee he’s keeping for today’s class. Weird. Huh. He pushes the thought to the back of his mind. Showers wins his attention.

“I got speed and you can poof into every place possible. You and I are the two last people who would be late for anything,” he counters, fixing a silver leather jacket on. Tosses one last look at the mirror, he runs his fingers through his hair and considers that as a comb-down.

“That’s not the point,” Kurt mildly protests, his German accent thickens considerably. “We’re supposed to be disciplined. Not to use our powers all the time.”

Peter glances at his wristwatch, tapping the glass exaggeratingly. “If you don’t poof us into the classroom now—”

Kurt resists rolling his amber eyes. The portal opens behind him, radiating swirls of indigo-hued smoke and acrid sulphuric odour—reminds Peter of hell, not that he would ever tell the German mutant.

It’s an agonising slow start of the day. Five minutes into Hank’s lecture on Darwinism and evolution, he finishes four pages worth of dodgy sketches of his classmates. One hand absentmindedly rubbing his once-injured leg. New Peter doesn’t guarantee longer attention span.

“Are you okay, Peter?” Kurt whispers, covers one hand over his mouth. “Been having nightmares?”

Nightmares. Nightmares. Nightmares. Peter searches his mind for a flicker of something. Anything. He thinks he might has unpleasant dreams. But nothing. Nothing. His mind is empty.

Mindless anxiety floods his system with rushing dread, time naturally deaccelerates. He needs time. Time for his mind to jumpstart a plethora options for him to choose from. There’s;

Option 1. Create a diversion.

Option 2. Create a bigger diversion.

Option 3. Leave him hanging. Ignore the question.

Option 4. Lie. Lie. Lie. Lie. With a smile.

Peter forces himself to smile, toothy sincere lips splitting smile. “Me? Of course, I’m fine. No trouble whatsoever, sir.” Peter straightens his spine. Half-lifts a silver inquiring brow. “What makes you think I’m not?”

Kurt shrugs, eyes narrowed and lips puckered when he’s trying to translate German into English inside his head. “I thought I heard you talking sleep,” he says, dragging the last syllable into a question.

(He doesn’t sleep talk. Never sleep walk. Or sleep anything. It’s . . . it’s . . . it’s just Peter cannot remember a _fucking_ thing. Sleeping shirtless, waking up with a tee. Waking up to his boxer inside out, sleeping with his boxers properly on.)

“It’s sleep talking,” Jubilee interjects, somewhere from their left. Entertainment Weekly tucked between the pages of their biology textbook.

“Also known formally as somniloquy,” Jean offers, still staring ahead.

“Thank you, Miss Know-It-All, for enlightening us with that linguistic information,” Kurt says, fangs bearing pearly-white grin.

“Got lucky last night?” Ororo asks, twirling a badly chewed pencil between her fingers.

Peter scoffs, spreads an offended palm flat on his chest. “I don’t sleep talk. I sleep sing. Gotta practice for the talent show, ya know. I’m not just fast.”

Ororo questions, russet eyes sparkling at the thought and far too invested than to be casually interested. Peter likes it. “What talent show?”

“You sing?” Kurt asks.

“I’m a man of many tricks.” Peter winks, deflects the concern in those yellow irises.

“We have a talent show? I’m thinking fireworks. The Fourth of July kind of fireworks,” Jubilee says, “for the opening or closing night.”

“Don’t change the subject. You got a secret lover that you’re not sharing with us?” Scott finally breaks his silence.

That uni-eyed goggle wearer couldn’t resist participating in gossips he once said was too childish. Hypocrite.

Peter makes a show of staring at his left and right. Before pointing a finger at himself. “A secret lover, me? What about you, I’ve seen you looking at a certain someone—”

Scott retorts, motioning at his own throat, “So that’s not a hickey on your neck?”

(See _this_. There’s a scent on his throat, that reeks of wild berry and herbs, that he cannot seems to put a face or a name to. He hasn’t put serious moves on the girls here. Too young for his own good.)

“Just a mosquito bite,” Peter replies, flippantly. Unconvincingly too.

“That’s one very big and sexy mosquito bite,” Scott remarks, smirking a victor’s triumph.

(Peter feels— _knows_ a chunk of his memories is compromised. Tampered. Almost as if someone sticks needles into a cake and removes them, then smoothens the icing to cover up the tiny holes. He doesn’t think it’s Charles or Jean feeling curious about his brain. Really, he’s not interesting as Hank or even Kurt. This amnesia—if he can call it that—ends now. An idea clicks, forms in his mind.)


	3. Chatting in All The Wrong Places.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She breaks his defence as easy as her scarlet crushes steel. Wanda takes control of his imaginary strings with her scarlet.
> 
> \--
> 
> He takes the distraction wherever and whenever he can find it.

Her visits are infrequent and unpredictable. Wanda hates it.

Mission takes her away from the Avengers Tower. Wanda ventures deep in a remote jungle, and treacherous turquoise ocean that leaves nothing to fate or luck surrounds her.

It’s almost insulting when she notices the extra packages marked with the personal emblem of her fellow Avengers. As if she couldn’t survive. She did fine all those years. She has— _had_ , has _, had_ —Pietro then. Her knowledge of herbs sustained them both. It will serve her well again.

Other times, training has her sleepless and relying on wits and tools for survival.

Even the littlest sleep, the ones she wrestles from ever changing battle tactics and sneaky guerrilla attacks, fogs her mind and dulls her senses. Worse even, there’s a rabid itch within her, festering, and madness grips her mood and locking it to perpetual annoyance.

_It’s far too long since the last._

It’s an embarrassing admission, even as she turns the words in her mind for a well-thought rumination. Wanda has desperation squatting in her ribs, chafing under her skin, burning at the edge of her tongue. The madness is spreading. It’s everywhere. She really, really needs to relieve it.

Two minutes after stepping into what passes as her assigned bedroom, Wanda collapses on the bed. Unceremoniously, of course.

With grime-crusted boots still tacked to her feet. With ripped jeans that she could have auctioned for a fortune back in Sokovia. With dirt-smeared white tee shirt barely keeping her warm.

Wanda lets her mind flee from this plane. And off she goes, traveling down the beaten pathway of merlot bricks, lighted by dancing periwinkle orbs. The diamond-specked abyss fades into Gothic mahogany floor and varnished wooden panelling floors.

Relief slips through the cracks of her lips at the sight of gaudy vintage posters of men with big hairs and hippie attires. Their clothing reminds her of the ones her _deda_ wore in faded, creased photographs.

His breaths are steady, humming beats that welcomes Wanda in an orchestral convivial parade.

It’s a composition only (this, her, this, her) Pietro could perform. If she closes her eyes, Wanda could almost pretend that it’s her Pietro asleep on a bed, half-dressed and a blanket draped over his thigh.

“So, you’re real,” a high-pitched voice pipes up from the bed. Too clear for him to be rudely and newly awakened from sleep, and she catches a hint of awe in his youthful voice. “I thought I’m losing my mind to old age. With memory all gone haywire,” he says, sitting up and flicks his hair, “The white hair doesn’t really dissuade people from thinking I’m a lot older than I actually am.”

The illusion is ruined.

“It’s super strange. Because I usually sleep shirtless, and sometimes I wake up with a shirt on. I don’t sleepwalk,” he rambles; her presence somewhat forgotten. “Are you the reason for my blackouts? Messing other people’s mind is never cool, ya know, it’s like the basic ethic for psychics. See, I paid attention in Mindreading 101.”

Her patience for his redundant inquiries is paper-thin. And every ticking second, he fires another variation of his ‘who are you’ questions, erodes her built-up unflappability.

He’s falcon-swift on his feet, out from the bed. “Your eyes are glowing. Like bloody red. That’s equal parts amazing and scary. The professor can help—”

“Please,” she mutters, pressing an impatient finger on his lips. “Just a moment of silence.”

Effervescent scarlet eddies from her finger, circling his vibrating thoughts ragingly, culls silvery roots over them.

He resists her, rushing his thoughts at bullet-train speeds. That her gripping scarlet would slip off from the vines, like slippery eels. It works. But only for a moment.

She breaks his defence as easy as her scarlet crushes steel. Wanda takes control of his imaginary strings with her scarlet. There’s no puppeteer but her. She leads him to the desk chair, pushing him back. “Please, sit.”

He keeps himself still and removes his boxers. The crimson daze settles, reflected in his glassy-eyed stare. He tilts his head sideways, thumbing his chin. “So, you’re probably not here for a friendly chitchat,” he mumbles, gesturing at the boots and jeans she tossed aside. “Why are you here? I have not much if you’re planning to rob me—”

“You talk too much.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry about that,” he says, pale pink lips curl into a charmingly sheepish smile.

Wanda straddles him, wordlessly. Vehemently. Her waxen knees burrowing scrawny half-moons into his ashen thighs as her parched lips, bearing the trace of barren wasteland and fragrance of lust, snag him in a kiss.

Perhaps, Wanda is fragile and reedy in his arms. This Pietro knows this, takes needless steps to touch her like she’s fancy coloured-glass sculpture. Inexperienced and fearful. She’ll change that—

His hands are still smooth, and woefully delicate. But there’s a firmness in the way his palms press on the wings of her spine, the gentle skim of his skin against hers—her spine shivers like it has once, unbidden. This is all _him_ , without her tinkering, guiding his hands and lips in Pietro’s movements. Almost as if her Pietro peering out from this second-rate imitation.

Pietro’s a fast learner. This silver-haired man shares the same trait. Or her memories of Pietro carried within her scarlet finally rubs off on him.

Somehow, they end up on his bed. The journey from chair to bed, is an instant one, but leaves a messy trail of clothes blown across his room. She thinks one boot knocks the ceiling and the other half slams against the headboard. His sneakers end up hanging over the curtain’s railings.

Later, when the thirst in her muscles is satiated, her prickly irritation is nipped by this skin-to-skin reacquaintance and her brassiere strapped on, she considers a concession.

He riffles his drawer, shaking his head at the two tees he holds high up in the air and stuffs the unchosen tee back into the drawer. He’s halfway slipping the shirt over his head when she interrupts him, “Loose the shirt.”

“Why? It’s getting a little chilly,” he whines, pursing his lips into a pout. Her Pietro has— _used to_ —mimic a duck’s pout all to annoy her. It’s practically identical. This Pietro submits to her words, without her scarlet directing him.

He flops on the bed, half of him and his long legs dangling over the bed’s edge. Keeps a distance between her and him in his single sized bed. One hand reaches for his pillow, and he hugs it tight. His forehead bears the wrinkling lines of a frown.

“There’s a lot of people in this mansion. Professor Charles, he’s loaded and he owns this place and reads mind, powers like yours and older, if you’re into polite English gentleman. Or Dr. McCoy, super-smart and all the blue brawns—the man has a mean growl. He’s older too, not as old as the Professor. But there’s younger too—"

Strangely, she thinks he’s less annoying now. Must be the silly pout. It has always work on her whenever Pietro tries to diffuse tension brokered over his puerile flirting and her raging recklessness.

“—Why not Scott? He’s like the jockest person you can find here. And handsome, once you get passed that special glasses he wears. And he’s all tough and a jerk face outside, but really, totally soft after you drill a hole to his armour of jerkassery. Or Kurt? Kurt’s blue too but cute, and he has this tail and insanely acrobatic.”

“It’s you,” she says, sighing. Wanda feels a little charitable tonight. Indulgent even. And a little looser with her guarded secrets. “It’s you because you’re the only one who can see me.”

“That’s awesome and not awesome. So, you’re like a ghost, but I can feel you and—” his voice trails off, and he extends a finger, an ill disguise to poke her, slower than normal speed. For her benefit mostly.

His face is incredibly expressive, she thinks, and a tad sheltered. The corners of his lips curving into an infectious smile full of adoration and wonder, but his pewter brows dip lower. “—can you feel me too, right? That this is all happening. Not a dream.”

Wanda bites back a sigh. “I definitely can feel you,” she dryly says, forking out a thin-lipped smile.

His hair, frosted silver and unkempt, bobs up and down slow. As if he’s digesting her admission like minty cough drop, and his mind is still half-fogged with her scarlet. Then he rushes through his words, a train of hurried words almost indecipherable, in rabid cheerfulness, “Groovy accent by the way. You’re from Serbia? Grandma’s Serbian. Or was it grandpa? Either way, someone was Romanian. And they’re all dead now.”

It’s never her intention to answer. Yet she replies anyway. “Not Serbia.” Even clarifies her response. “Sokovia.”

“Where’s that—”

He sprints to the globe, flashing his torchlight over the globe and spins it ridiculously fast.

“It’s somewhere in Eastern Europe,” she says, tying the laces of her boot.

“Huh, I don’t see it anywhere. Weird. Must have another name then,” he counters, index finger tracing along the axis line.

Pallid icy moonlight illuminates his form—lean, slender, _different_. His back is smooth, void of scars.

(Her Pietro’s back is a patchwork of crude scars imprinted by fallen debris, splintered wooden bed frame and gnarled steel. Scars even HYDRA couldn’t erase. A sobering reminder that this tawny-eyed Pietro isn’t hers.)

“So, will I be just sleep-singing again? Dreaming that I got Freddie Mercury’s voice?”

He’s still hunched over the globe, brows furrowing. Wanda could see his eyes are tacked on the Atlantic Ocean far too long. He flicks a too-quick gaze at her, and she swear seeing pensiveness gleaming in cognac eyes.

“Ya know, sleep-talking,” he quickly adds, to cut into the sudden stillness. He chuckles a little too hasty, too high.

“Yes,” Wanda simply says, rising to her feet.

“Will it hurt?” he asks, and his voice registers so low, she could mistake it as a whisper.

“It won’t,” she promises. Wanda musters her softest smile for him.

He sighs. Tiredly. Briefly. Now, his face wears the mask of upbeat civility. “Erase away,” he says, smiling. The flippancy in his tone is hollow.

Without another exchange, Wanda shapes this encounter into another obscure dreams, too vivid, extremely preposterous to be real.

(Guilt pools at the pit of her stomach, striking her iron-hot. Where did that shame come from? She’s padlocked her conscience into self-erected scarlet cage. The line’s crossed, the chasm deepens—Wanda’s already committed the worst of sins long before she and Pietro understand the subtext their consummation carries. This shouldn’t matter anymore than a pair of twins joined in the altar of love.)

* * *

He’s on a roll, crushing these chumps with slick fingers, dashingly handsome grin and a bottle of Pepsi.

High-powered men with their shining golden Rolexes, Cuban cigars clipped between tobacco-stained teeth and sparkling champagne spilling onto velvet tablecloth.

It’s too easy. Challenging men, they’re not. They told him, toothy smile and automatic guns attached to their hips and holsters, “We’ve been conquering poker a lot longer than you, babyface.”

“We’ll see,” he says, tossing a poker chip to the table’s centre. “Deal, old man.”

Even their state-of-the-art surveillance technology cannot stop Peter. It’s almost as like taking a candy from a stingy baby. Scratch that thought out. It _is_. He takes the distraction wherever and whenever he can find it.

He cleans them out in three rounds. Two to fool them into thinking he’s on a losing streak, and the final round to pull a miracle out from the hat.

“Who’s the babyface now,” Peter victoriously declares, slapping his cards against the table. The collective sighs of denials and outrage he hopes for . . . doesn’t come. “Why the stunned silence, George—”

They’re frozen. Legitimately no signs of any movement, like polaroid snapshots. He tosses a poker chip up in the air. It falls on the ground at normal speed.

Well, that’s disappointing. Definitely  _not_ a time manipulator. Must be one of those psychics mind-controlling everyone again.

“I don’t think Professor McCoy approves you gambling,” Jean quips, and Peter could almost hear the frown sitting on her forehead.

“Chill, Jean. I’m not exactly taking their money. I’m a reformed kleptomaniac.”

He’s really hoping to score a second winning round. To prove his win isn’t entirely the fruits of luck. Because he can. Really, he’s a decent poker player. Peter likes to think so.

“But man, it feels good to win.”

“It’s still cheating.”

“Eh, semantics. I say it’s all good fun, you say it’s deceiving people.”

Peter unhooks the industrial grade duct tape around his belt, peels copious amount of tape and fastens it over his poker mates to their chairs and table. He could positively do all this before Jean could blink. Still, she went all the trouble to turn these chumps into mannequins. No kinetic energy to utilise anyway.

He expertly straps two strips of duct tape in X-shape on each man’s face, walks up to the burly security guard. Tapes hairy and beefy hands to terrible polished guns, before pushing Roberto against the wall, secures his safety there. “But what brings you to this shady part of town?”

“Professor Xavier wants us all back for 1500 briefing.”

Satisfied with his handiwork, Peter casts a sweeping gaze around the room. No flame-haired mind-reader, with legs that seems to stretch for days. He does a swift rounding up of the building. Then returns to the poker room. Still no signs of Jean.

“Where are you?”

“Look again.”

This time, he spots her, leaning by the doorframe. Arms crossed over her chest. The ends of her rose-painted lips twitch into a grin. Even so, she has no shadows. The room still reeks of burnt cigars, heady cologne, crisped money and gunpowder. None of that drowsily sweet lily fragrance, delicate and surpassingly precious, the sort of perfume that snares the attention of those in its presence.

“Are you real or in my head?”

“In your head.”

“Are you nearby? Need me to chauffeur you back to the mansion? I’m a lot faster, and cheaper than Scott.”

“I’m with Ororo. Thanks for the offer,” she pauses, chewing her lower lip. Piano fingers squeezing her upper arms, when she’s thinking. Cautiously, she wrings a smile that barely touches the corners of her emerald-green eyes.

He isn’t fond of _that_ look anymore then he does when he sees it carved on Kurt’s tattooed blue face.

(He doesn’t need another open secret; it’s bad enough the entire school seems to know his father is a literal mutant terrorist.)

“Peter, is everything alright with you? Having any bad dreams?”

Peter doesn’t do rude. His mother taught him to be a better man. Not to embrace the assholeness imbedded in the twisted strands of his genes, courtesy of father dearest. Witty remarks are fair game, and Peter knows his acerbic retorts just slides off like harmless comments.

“I’m just doing a lot of sleep-talking.” He shrugs, slips a hand into his jacket, feeling for the bulky pager he tinkered over with tools inappropriately borrowed from McCoy’s lab, while wolfing down a box of Twinkies and his teeth clamping the end of a flashlight, and punches in the code.

“There’s nothing wrong with—”

He cuts her with a grin, and says, “And the occasional fantasy coming true—me attending Led Zeppelin concert, front row. I even get to play the guitar solo,” pauses to strum an invisible guitar.

“That’s all. Nothing to fuss about. I’d think Scotty boy would appreciate the concern more than I do,” Peter retorts, fixing his glasses and clips his headphones on. One thumb hovering over the ‘play’ button. “Gotta run, Jean. The police’s on their way.”

Jean sighs.

Peter runs.

All is well, and it’s just another day, another distraction, another difference made.

It’s much, much later when the skies above him are nothing but bleak black and the wind howls a melody of squirming solitude, and his knuckles are white with longing, Peter picks up the phone on its first ring.

He bypasses the ‘Hellos’ and breathes out, “Wendy.”

“Felon.”

She chuckles, disgustingly smug. But Peter smiles all the same. Wider even.

“Not a felon,” he hotly counters, puffs his chest with pride. “I _wasn’t_ caught.”

“Doesn’t change the fact you assisted in a jail break.”

“I’m not the one who spent a night in jail for unlawful partying.”

“It was a mock-up jail experience,” Wendy retorts, and he could picture her nostrils flaring, dusky blue eyes narrowing and one hand on her hips. The perfect depiction of unbridled annoyance at his win in their little repartee.

“How’s school? It’s been what—ten years since we left high school.”

“It’s stupidly boring. The classes dragged on, and so much rehash. The repeated early morning alarms. Everyone’s here so _thoughtful_ and vicious gossip-mongers.”

She lets out a peal of laughter. The kind where her shoulders should shake upwards and down, like a rollercoaster ride, and her eyes would get all squinty, and her cheeks are cheery-flushed, and her laugh lines deepen.

Peter gasps. Utterly scandalised, completely pleased, thoroughly amused. “It’s not funny,” he hisses, suppressing a chuckle threatened to escape.

“We both know you don’t do good decisions.”

“That’s why we usually stick together. We’re twins. That’s like god given thing. Practically natural,” he reminds her, keeps his voice airy.

“But occasionally you did good. I think the school’s productive for you.”

Then she drops her melodic tone to hushed murmurs. “They found out that I’m not normal,” she says, and his heart is crushed by the timidity and fear reverberating in her voice.

“Where will you go?”

There’s a long pause. And he hears furious tapping against glass, her voice seems distant but louder, and she’s mumbling coarse words, perhaps flipping her finger and sighs, forgotten he’s at the other end. Peter listens, listens and never stop listening. She’s using the phonebooth again—please be safe, please be safe.

“Anywhere I don’t stand out.”

It’s the same answer he’s heard over the last decade. It’s standard. It’s stale. It’s too vague. He wishes for concrete answers. Peter wishes for a lot of things, but it rarely comes true.

He wants to say, ‘please, please, don’t disappear too long’, he could beg, plea or even offer to come and sweep her away from this nomadic lifestyle Wendy carved for herself.

But he doesn’t.

He can’t.

“You _call_ me— _write_ me a letter— _send_ a bloody postcard, okay?”

“Ya know, I’ll do that.”

He knows she’s lying through her soft smiles and hollow promises. But Peter holds his tongue in check. He cannot lose Wendy to late night what-ifs and aimless searches in his own version of ‘Where’s Wendy?’ across spring-freshen meadows, summer balmy nights, raked autumn leaves and frozen tundra.

“I got a mission,” he says.

It is neutral. Lets her off from spiralling into guilt, or pulling away. He gets her, orbiting around his periphery, even if she tends to disappear every now and then.

She exhales, deep and purely relieved. “Good luck, and stay alive for me.”

He smiles into the phone, ridiculous that may be.

“I love you.”

He knows; her lips never fail to quirk upwards, unabashedly genuine and a mirror of his own smile.

“I love you too.”


	4. The Two Lives of The Maximoffs.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She inhales, dissipating her scarlet from nerve-wrecked fingers. “There’s a door, knock.”
> 
> \--
> 
> He drains the speed from his legs. Slows himself to normal time.

She sits with her back against the wall, curling spine pressed flatly. Not the perfect melding of two outward curves, mimicking the exquisite arch of raven’s wings. Even so, navy blue jacket draped over her shoulders, a cloak of illicit chivalry, is enough to stave the bitter twinge in her chest.

The tower is an impregnatable glass-cased fortress, bolstered by the devoted attention of never sleeping artificial guards. She is safe. Wanda knows she is.

And yet, her shoulders are corded with wary tension, hair on her neck prickles at the merest disturbance stirring in the air. Surging scarlet mist coats her fingertips, like wispy cornered hissing medusa’s snakes. Afterthoughts born out of crumbling Sokovian streets, dust swirling in the air and bombshells at precarious edges.

Vision, in tacky blue corduroy sweater, loose denim pants and ponderously European Sunday loafers, partially phased through the walls—and his suspiciously human-like blue eyes shut. He questions in childishly innocence, “Morning, Wanda. Would you like to join me for breakfast? Or rather have breakfast in bed?”

(They leave her alone. Mostly. The occasional inclusion into cosy diners and their cheery, American small-town folk charms as rewards. Always the Captain and his shiny apologetic smile, extending the invitation for brunch, and the Falcon and his roguish grin edging her to join. But the one— _only_ —person Wanda wants isn’t there. When she laughs, his merry smile isn’t accompanying hers. How she wishes she could bring the other Pietro here, with her.)

“I think we’ve not reached _that_ milestone yet,” she retorts, grabbing a bleached plastic card and its faded Cyrillic script, slots it into the glossy pages, and slides the closed book beneath scattered musical scores.

She inhales, dissipating her scarlet from nerve-wrecked fingers. “There’s a door, _knock_.”

(Pietro would never accept this intrusion, but she is not Pietro. And the other—flint-haired, candy-brown eyes sparkling with curiosity and melancholic humour, with smiles that quirkily distracting and dimpled—is miles, miles, and too many miles to be quantifiable, a universe, a dimension away. She imagines he’s very bit protective too, fiercely matched or more so than her Pietro’s.)

His eyes are still closed, she considers it an improvement somewhat. “Am I intruding you?”

Wanda sighs, folding her arms across her chest. “Vis, we talked about this.”

“Oh, I thought this was faster,” he splutters, and hurries to add, “And I made sure I would not infringe in your privacy.”

His words echo the cogs of a child’s limited understanding of boundaries. The daisy-white starched collar contrasts his metallic currant skin, and his whole get-up lifted from last season’s autumn catalogue, paints an android fashioned in the image of an adult man.

“Your solution is to close your eyes?” Wanda counters, unimpressed. “And you can open your eyes now.”

He opens one eye; half-raise a hairless brow. “Yes, I believe that’s sufficient. Is it not?”

“Not a good one. But please, Vis, next time,” Wanda pauses, jerks her chin at the door’s direction. “The door is there. And if I’m not answering immediately, three knocks first and then _maybe_ you can phase in.”

“That sounds like a good alternative,” he concedes, flashing a smile full of straight pearly teeth. “Do you need some help in translating texts? I noticed you have a Sokovia-English dictionary, next to your pillow,” he says, directing a finger at her bed.

“I-It’s just some light reading,” she lies easily. “Some words stumped me.”

“Your dictionary isn’t the latest edition,” Vision points out.

“There hasn’t been an updated version since the war,” she snorts, fingering the cracked leather spine. Pietro salvaged this from a roofless library, spent the whole month testing the feel of exotic words on his tongue.

“I think I can cobble up one. I’m a glorified SIRI, with dashing looks and incredible tastes in clothing,” he replies, lips splitting into a grin he’d practiced over mirror.

“You haven’t been getting this excellent fashion taste from old magazines, have you? Bought your own clothes, I assume.” Wanda allows lips to curl into a bemused smirk.

His mouth opens briefly, then closes. Vision finds his voice, fumbling and red brows squished together, “Sam said it was the only way to be fashionable.”

“Of course, he did.” Wanda amends at the deflated look etched on Vision’s face, “It’s a good look, if you want to look like a poor college professor.”

The triumphant puppy smile returns to Vision’s crimson lips. “Thank you for the compliment. I will get to work on the dictionary.” He pivots on his heels, heading for her door.

Wanda thinks of the hours lost, between rereading passages buried in jargons and convoluted impersonal explanations, and having to painfully substitute English words with Sokovian ones until she understands the science with crystalline clarity.

(Pietro will be here. With her. Two Maximoffs together again. Two halves formed a whole. She just has to pluck him out from his universe.)

“Do you think there’s more than one universe? Parallel universes, alternate universes. I get that we might have thousands if not millions of galaxies out there. Thor’s an alien. His brother, Loki, is a frost giant. Another alien. But—”

Vision halts, turns to face her. “Multiverse theory is an intriguing concept.”

“It’s not a concept. I think I’ve visited once.”

* * *

“So, what are we’re up against?” Jean quips, the timbre of her voice hitches the same way as she frets and worry lines crease her smooth forehead. The same ones Peter had seen during his poker excursions.

“Pyromaniac, porcupine boy, and a literal ball of doom,” Jubilee offers, craning her neck to look pass Hank’s shoulders. Nonchalantly, and a little too oblivious.

Scott’s brows furrow a lot, lips pursed in battle plans formulation. Peter thinks, Scott would be next in line to join Peter in the premature ageing club—or alternatively named White-Haired Club (the name is a work in progress). “Let’s secure the civilians first. Nightcrawler and Quicksilver, you two make sure that no humans and mutants within a three-mile radius. Storm, contain the fire. Jubilee and Jean—”

Ororo interjects, eyeing Scott critically, “I thought we’re supposed to be using our code names. What’s the point of announcing our identities to the public?”

“ _Wondra_ and _Marvel Girl_ will handle pyromaniac,” Scott hisses through tightly clenched jaw, “Beast and I will take porcupine and doomball. Any further questions?”

Kurt timidly raises a three-fingered hand up, “After all the civilians are secured, which one should Peter—Quicksilver and I tackle?”

“Whichever you guys feel is easier to fight against,” Scott mumbles, casting a ‘help me out’ glance at Jean—she simply shrugs.

“That’s not a very good strategy, Cyclops,” Ororo quips, popping the ‘p’ with faux reverence.

Peter thinks for a witty remark, to diffuse the heckling tension. His silver tongue fails him, only lips pressed into thin-lipped smile and all he could say is “Woah. Central Park is flaming.” It is almost poor taste, but the fire leaping for the skies and the crackling noise of snapped branches swallow his words.

(But really, all that rattles inside his skull is a singular word spelling out “wait”. His stomach lurches at the word. Peter thinks it’s an ill omen.)

Hank merely mentions, as if he’s above their pretty display of establishing dominance and he probably is, “Saddle up, mutants. Here we go.”

Peter runs. As he always has. As he always does. Darting through semi petrified people, near motionless animals and sceneries resembling hand-painted watercolour pictures of a flip art book.

The fire still scorches the forest. Ororo’s mid-air, outstretched hands commanding wind and rain. Kurt vanishes into his portal, one hand grabbing a child, wrapping his tail around another and the other hand sweeping around the babysitter’s shoulders. Scott lowers his visor, energy blast sluggishly emerging from ruby glowing eyes. Hank lunges, on all four, towards their enemy. Jubilee’s fingertips emitting sparks, half-forming. Jean moves two fingers to her temple, ready to bring her telekinesis power into foray.

Peter runs. Moves an old couple off from the bench, scoops a bicycling woman off from her bike, collects the folks drinking by the lake. Each step takes out more of his muscles, heavier and sinks, and dents the ground he runs on.

He deposits them at the ambulance and paramedics still half-caught getting out from their seats. Their motions are slower—but Peter knows it is not crawling, trickling, agonising slow as it can be. Peter forces more speed to his legs. Their motions do not change.

( _Something is off_ , the little voice in his head shrieks. But he has no time for that. No, no, no. Run. Sprint. He has a mission. Peter silences the thought and runs.)

He circles the park twice. Every person, every pet, every alive thing that he could carry—all are safe. Everyone but the policemen, trapped by cocoons of bones forming over them. Their eyes are bulging in fear. Their mouths muzzled by bones growing over them. That has to hurt like a bitch.

Peter sets his palms against the cocoon’s base, vibrates them faster, until the bones crack under his hands. Kurt jerks the bony cocoon layers apart and ushers the police officers into his portal for an effective extraction.

“There’s another civilian there,” Kurt says, using his tail to point the direction. “She’s hiding.”

“Gotcha, Blue.”

Peter tears through the chocking smog to the spot, vigilantly checking each shrub, tree and boulder. Where is she? Is she a mutant? Like Sue Storms, Invisible Girl? He thinks, and thinks, he should be fighting now. Tosses a fleeting glance over his shoulder. The team isn’t faring well.

He drains the speed from his legs. Slows himself to normal time. Then after he spots her, it’s all speeding to safety. A solid plan. Now only if he could see her.

“We’re the X-Men. We’re the ones trying to keep you alive,” he says, and hopes, his frantic dread doesn’t bleed into his disarmingly friendly greet. It works. Usually. Playing the affable human.

“Hey,” Peter beams, excitedly waving.

(He’s fast. Unbelievably fast. There’s time to react. Always have time to catch everything happening before it happens. Sometimes being fast is useless if you’re distracted.)

He’d checked the coast. There are only three mutants. The fourth’s hidden in plain sight. Of course, she does. But hardly anyone pays attention to the cowering girl hiding behind a nearby shrub.

She screams. Loud. Harpy screech battering his eardrums. The shockwave of her voice alone sends him flying backwards in the air, into the lake.

Dark indigo water envelopes him, like a heavy wool blanket. Absurd pressure compresses his chest, his lungs burns as if fire is lighted aflame underneath his ribcage. His heart hammering against his ribs, like a trapped bird pecking at its cage.

Peter is sinking.

The climbing weight of confined air blisters his throat in dreadful agony. Panic pounds his head in flurry angry fists, any second he feels his head about to explode. Peter tastes the briny lake, foul and disgusting.

(He is fast. And the world will always slows down for Peter Maximoff. And it is a laboriously slow descend into the bottom.)

A speedster’s body is meant to be durable against the speed he is capable of. Joints are solid as spring steel. Harder bones, denser bones than calcium. Soft tissue, skin and muscle proportionately enhanced to match.

He kicks. He tries that floating technique; flailing arms do not keep him afloat. But his body and his speed. It’s only dragging him deeper, dragging time into a blurry endless journey of suffocating.

This cannot be the way he dies. He screams. Bubbles of despair leave his mouth. Peter is voiceless again. Only icy-cold water thrusting up his nostrils, a stream of brackish water gushed into the back of his throat and nose, and pain blitzing throughout his body.

(Speed isn’t everything, he thinks. As he sinks deeper, deeper, and deeper into the lake. Peter wishes for _more_ time, more of _anything_. But speed cannot help him now.)

The hullabaloo and hectic sounds of the fight reverberating into the lake, drowns out to a low hum, bustling in his ears, steadily muting into hushed darkness.

A second drags too long. He waits for the reels of his life to play behind his eyelids. He waits. And waits. But there is nothing. No fond memories—any even. Just once, a katana about to slice his throat. That’s it.

He thinks someone mumbles, all garbled and a hint of Germanic vowels, “I got you.”


	5. In The Morning I'll Be Better.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s still half-mad. Wanda knows that.
> 
> \--
> 
> Peter’s startled. Shrieks, “Fuck.”

Her grief for Pietro is bitterly hysterical and utterly sickening. It engulfs her—burns her with flames of tangible yearning, and her mind, she reckons, is half mad because of it. But this Pietro staves the madness threatening to take root within her.

She’s still half-mad. Wanda knows that. She no longer desires to tear the world—the universe—apart for the injustice her Pietro suffers, for robbing her of the one thing she needs in her life.

Her baleful rage still simmers, slow but precluded by her lips on Pietro’s lips, her fingers carving her name on his bedpost, wavy auburn hair tangled with silver strands.

The lucid half of Wanda, is enamoured with curiosity, by the difference between her universe and this. She studies his room. It is smaller than the one Stark assigned her; even the bed is meant for one. Lush beige carpeting, varnished oak door, wooden panelling, bed-frame, study desk and the cabinets brought various shade of brown into the room.

The décor feels rich, not Stark’s nouveau riche that paints minimalist modern on its brown-and-white colour scheme. The kind of rich woven into the soil, steeped with ancestral wealth and sprawling prestigious lineages. Almost antiquated and a little romantic even.

His shelf is filled with vintage arcade memorabilia—the ones that filled the Sokovian streets after the war, no more new shinier gaming systems for a country in perpetual chaos.

Wanda runs a finger across a collection of cassette tapes. Names of bands listed among legendary rock and roll gamechangers, something that she occasionally finds Stark blaring the music from his labs. Absent are any recent music in the likes of Linkin Park, Paramore or even Coldplay.

Even the computer is small and thick, about the size of the black-and-white television set baka refused to switch. Most of the electronical appliances are meant for display in specialised museums, Wanda muses.

She riffles through his desk, in pursuit of a calendar. Finds his notebook, spiral-bound, battered and coffee-stained cover. Wanda flips to the first page, surrealistic doodles drawn on the bottom page. The name ‘Peter Maximoff’ written in sloppy fast scrawl—Pietro’s handwriting perfectly replicated.

( _Peter_ Maximoff. It’s all wrong. Unnatural. Peter— _Pietro_ —Peter— _Pietro_. He’s a Maximoff, like her. She’d always assumed their names remained the same, even if their looks are not. But his name, wonderfully sacred, bastardised in this world. She wonders, if he willingly chose to mutilate his beautiful name into a shadow of it and what else differs.)

His room is personalised, yet unrevealing. Colourful posters lined the walls, informs his taste in music. Yet there are no precious framed photographs of a mother, a father, a twin.

Her foot collides against the metallic bulky radio on the floor.

“Who are you? Are you robbing me? Bad news, pal, I have nothing worth stealing—” He is awake, and his motor mouth fills the silence. There is an edge to his sleep-tinged voice.

She detects his hand reaching for—curling around the haft of a baseball bat. Not the silver trails give his speed away, but the soft hum of his motion, almost indistinguishable from a whistle. Clint Barton relies on educated, calculated guesses for Pietro’s falcon-like movements. Wanda doesn’t need to. It’s the _same_ with this Pietro.

His questions have always been redundant.

Until it isn’t. “Have we meet? You so, so, _so_ look familiar.”

She loses the taste for playing each encounter as his first. Call it charity, or perhaps she simply feels the pull of forged comfort over this Pietro’s unabashedly cavalier smiles.

Wanda returns selected parts of their encounters—simplified and bowdlerised versions, and says, “Is that your best pick-up line? It’s terrible.” She isn’t sure why she chooses _this_ particular line—but she does.

His questions die instantly, giving way to the lopsided grin splitting his cherry lips. “My best? You haven’t seen a thing of beauty yet. Fair warning, I’m pretty smooth in sweeping people off their feet without the lines.”

“I know,” she replies, amused. She climbs onto his bed, her nightgown artfully arranged pooling around her ankles.

He cocks an eyebrow, flickering seriousness, before it fades into puzzlement. He licks his lower lip wet. “You know, _do_ you?”

“I have a _feeling_.”

He leans forward, catching the splendid brilliant moonlight with his cheekbones. His eyes, unblinking brown, crowned by a halo of dark circles. Cracked lips twitching into a strained grin. “Feeling, huh? So ominous.”

“A woman is entitled to have secrets of her own.”

He brushes his lips against the hollows of her throat, tender and burning. “I like secrets. Secrets are fun. Sexily fun,” he whispers into her neck.

“Where are we?”

“Westchester, New York.”

Wanda traces her fingertip along the curve of his jawline, nodding absentmindedly. She recognises this expression, seen it on her Pietro, on her own reflection in the cruel sleepless nights after escaping the orphanage to the streets.

(Has her visits turn his nights into vampiric blackhole, sucking the vibrant and infinite radiance from him. Has he’d been sleeping at all, free of any ills plaguing him or nightmares continually to haunt Maximoffs, like rabid hell-hounds, over all universes.)

“And the year?”

“1983,” he mumbles, his admiring raw-boned hand runs through her hair, as the caresses harden into frenzied and urgent hungry kisses.

“Not 2015?”

He chuckles, slides another hand around her waist, pulling her close to his pine-scented chest. He presses famished lips onto the razor of her collarbone, into her hair. “You’re funny. Nope, still 1983,” he mutters, and she almost missed the frenetic plea corded in his flippant words, “We should really stop talking.”

This is _not_ right. Wanda dips her scarlet into his mind, prodding the turbulence shivering within his silvery thoughts and emotions. There are bones splintering into a million cutting pieces. There is an indigo-skinned apocalyptic ancient monster sanctioned his death. There is a body made of sinking bones. There is a scream locked in a drowning throat. There is speed aiding no one, only dragging into an abyss. Somewhere in his mind, he combs over these incubuses with distractions, distractions—any distractions, and runs, runs, runs from it, come what may.

She’s not a fan of burying wrecked emotions with burning kisses and clawing nails on pale skin, and crying thoughts lost to wandering, aimless caresses. Not if those lips and fingers belong to silver-haired boy with heart-filling smiles.

Dreams and nightmares she could smoothen their serrated rims until they slide off from the grip of consciousness. But he is neither asleep nor dreaming. And Maximoffs talk. Maximoff twins spill their guts, unbidden and freely.

Even so, she doesn’t push—just as she would if _this_ Pietro is ocean-eyed, silver gold littering his angular jaw—skirting around the issues with irrelevant questions.

(There is rancorous irony in the lines she won’t crossed and the ones she already trampled. But the whims of her heart are a complex thing, and only Pietro understands it more than Wanda could ever have—hope to.)

“The night’s still too early for that,” she says, pressing a halting finger onto his lips, and she smirks, “And you looked like horse manure. Any reasons for that?”

“We’re playing therapy now?” He groans, puffing his cheeks, pouting, and reclines against the headboard. “I think I’ll pass. Maybe with alcohol, but superspeed means my body just flushes its effects in seconds. Bummer.”

“Then we don’t. Not my favourite game. I was never fond of doctors or scientists. We can just talk.”

She lies on her stomach, her arms folded over his thighs, lips furnished with a sardonic grin and her scarlet waits for the brusque set of his jaw, an indicator of his silent treatment to begin.

“Talk about what? The weather? There isn’t much to discuss beyond it’s past midnight, and,” he pauses, squinting at the windows, “I think there are stars.”

She ignores his annoyance, opts to question, “So, is there a Captain America here? Or Thor?”

He nods, pewter strands shaking lightly. “Captain America, yeah, we do. And Thor, Norse God of Thunder, right? The one married to Sif.”

“Thor’s married?”

“Well, that’s what Prose Edda said. Or the basics of Norse Mythology.”

“And Captain America?”

He snorts, albeit dramatically. “Not a fan of his comics though, but my sister—she’s totally in love with him. I say it’s because he’s blonde with baby blues, and have you seen the way he’s drawn? The abs on him?”

The Avengers. They’re fictional characters in this universe. A fact that Wanda isn’t sure she relishes in relief or horror. But his shoulders sag against the pillow, and he twirls a loose dark strand, playfully and tender. Wanda chooses to let tonight end on a lighter note—he could use a decent sleep.

“I think we have enough of talking for one night, don’t you think so?” Wanda says, kisses his inner wrist once.

“The night is still young,” he parrots back, boyish smirk in place. It sways her a little—to stay, but she’s set on her decision.

“Nice try,” she offers, and is truly apologetic, “But I must leave.”

“We’ve been seeing each other like star-crossed lovers. At least Romeo knows Juliet’s name. I don’t even know yours.”

“It’s W—”

(This Pietro has never taste the lips of another Maximoff with a lover’s intimacy, the melding of two flesh born from one womb, the tangling of feminine and masculine limbs, sprawled over the same space, a perfect fit of two halves of a soul.)

“ _Scarlet_ ,” she lies blatantly, without hesitation.

“Will you come back again, Scarlet?”

“I will. _Always_.”

She sits up, gathers her scarlet in between a play of fingers and sends them into his mind. Carefully she files sharp edges of his night terrors into white noise, pecks his forehead, and whispers, “Rest well, my love.”

This tastes almost like a routine; remember, sex, talk, forget.

* * *

Peter basks in the feeble sunlight streaking through uneven emerald canopy. Sparkling turquoise sheen of pristine water settles between his wiggling toes. Luxurious soft grass tickling his neck.

He likes this. Alone. The air is far crispier than the school’s, weird as that is. Cute little birds perched overhead, twitting chirpy songs. He could understand why Wendy prefers the solitude of the forest.

Peter’s the opposite. He’s a man of the people. Sort of. He savours the fluttery of activities happening around him—each one he has time to imagine all possible scenarios, their solutions and to decide—let nature runs its course or he could alter for better, for the worst. Of course, then gives himself an imaginary pat on the shoulder.

His feet traversed miles and miles of dirt, asphalt, mud and all earthy soil, covered the entire American continent. Whizzing through leaves suspended in slow aerial motion, cars that hasn’t budge an inch along the highways and bored families wishing they could be somewhere else.

It is exhilaratingly good to run, run and run while the world moves in an unhurried slink for the many decisions and paths waiting to be carved, for the ones he had he chosen and altered.

Still he finds himself roaming the dense Westchester greenery, opting for a lazy afternoon by the lake.

(But something is _different_ , Peter thinks, and it’s the only thing his mind won’t let him bury.)

He’s not alone.

Twigs broken under heavy hunting boots. Leaves rustling as rifles brush their metal barrels against the forked and sparse stems of nearby shrubs.

“Bryan, looks like we got a stray,” a man utters, sounding older and inhaled several packets of cigarettes in one go.

Someone else coughs, and nasally asks, “How do you know he’s one of _those_ freaks?”

“He got white hair, look. No kid I know have white hair like that.”

“Let’s kill two birds with several bullets. It’s deer hunting season after all. Accidents happened.”

The tree behind him exploded into fragments of bark and splinters flying in every direction. Each bullet narrowly missing his face, head, body. And—he can _not_ see them. More bullets roar into his ear drums, rattling his hearing.

“Matt, did I get him?”

The hunter groans. “Boy’s still alive.”

“Damn it. Don’t let him get away.”

He still hears riffles being reloaded.

They’re chasing— _hunting_ him.

Peter’s startled. Shrieks, “ _Fuck_.” And the world does not stop for him.

He scrambles to his feet, and runs. Abandons his shoes, tucking them underneath his arms. The grass is a wretched wiry field, unpleasantly jagged pebbles poked and blistered his bare feet.

He wipes perspiration, clinging to his forehead like stubborn coffee stains, off with his sleeves. He never sweat. Not from this exertion on his straining muscles, on his heart battering against his ribs, on the fear firing hot panic into every exposed skin of his body.

(That’s a lie. He remembers the hours spent sprinting before they could corner him, could demand his money, could belittle his funny accent—and he would wish he could run, lightning fast and leave them in the dust, with his sister by his side. Years before inches added to his frame, a time where his hair is cropped short to his scalp and mouse-hued, and his family was complete.)

The bullets are endless, pursuing him, like hungry cheetahs galloping for antelopes.

Peter runs. Feet pounding the uneven terrains, shooting jarring pain from his ankles to his knees. Each footfall weighs brick-heavy, as if he attached brass anklets on his calves and thighs. Yet time remains as it was—he’s not fast.

He slips outwards on the grass, as he turns the corner with the grace of a clumsy puffin on island rocks. His lungs screaming for air, and Peter inhales deeper, faster. One bullet grazes his arm, crimson liquid bleeding from a straight line slashed into his skin.

It happens. Almost too late for him to switch directions. Peter closes his eyes, raises his arms over his face, _smashes_ into four trees in a row, at the sudden rush of speed into his legs.

The coast falls into an abnormal stillness—he’s in control of his speed again.

Peter wastes no time. Grabs the rifles out from the hunters, emptying their bullets, pockets their knives, stripping them of any potential weapons. And leaves them behind. His frantic fingers fumbling over his pager, stabbing the code in. Destination; _home_.

It’s almost hours later, he’s hogging the phone in the common room, stealing it into the janitorial closet. He waits. Rubs his thighs with zealous brushing, scrubbing the phantom pain throbbing in his bones.

He answers at the first ring. Not the second. Or third. “Hey,” he says, reined and relieved.

“Hey,” she rasps, but he likes to imagine her lips curling into a smile—so he can mirror it too. “Another mission? So soon.”

He shakes his head, even though there is no audience, and shakes troubling thoughts away. “No. No mission. I just want to talk to you.”

They lapse into silence—and it ends abrupt by her question, “Петер, јеси ли добро?”

(Peter, jesi li dobro? _Peter, are you okay?_ She’s demanding a reason, it’s not a question.)

His mind works out puzzles in peregrine-swiftness. Silence also feels a lot longer to him, to Peter balancing his next words in the scale of honesty; to lie, to be frank, to pretend, to be truthful.

“I’m fine. Always fine.”

(He always has a soft spot for the fourth option. Lie, lie, lie, lie with a smile. Bloodless conflict averted, only one heart affected. He’s taking a page out of Tatiana Maximoff’s conflict avoidance playbook, minus the midday drink.)

“Don’t lie to me, _Pietro_. You’ve paged me twice in a week,” she hisses, figurative talons out to strike his lies.

“I’m not lying, _Wanda_.”

(He should have known better. It is hard to lie to the one person he’s spent years practicing his lies with. She knows. But she’s not much better than he is. Tatiana is their mother after all.)

“I miss you,” he confesses, reedy and utterly miserable.

“I miss you too,” she sighs, and this admission is genuine and brittle in the air.

Her next inquiry is trembling quiet and guilt-plated. “How’s majka?”

“As _usual_. But I made sure I took out the trash and the bottles out, restocked the fridge before I left.

The mood is too morbid for a pair of twins separated by choices made, choices left untouched and borders immovable from the maps. He’s back to his old tricks. One that’s safe, and neutral. “Have I mentioned we have a pool? And so many rooms you and I don’t even need to share.”

Wendy snorts, the tension ebbs from the arcs of her shoulders—the way it usually does when she finds him ridiculous. “Peter, the mutant life isn’t for me. Ya know that.”

“You can’t blame me for trying.”

“Even though you got the same results over and over? That’s called ‘stupid’.”

They talk some more, rarely touching on matters that troubled their hearts and minds. Of things so nonsensical, about a dog that reminded her of their old moustached principal, Peter could zone out. Mostly he listens. Wendy talks, and laughs—and his anxiety melts away with her snorts.

“I have to go, Peter. Stay alive for me.”

“I love you, Wendy.”

“I love you too.”

She hangs up. She makes the call, and she ends it. That way he will know—she’s okay, no sudden kidnappings cutting their conversation short.

Peter slips out from the closet, returns the phone back to the common room.

“Peter,” Kurt calls out from the end of the hallway, “Have you seen my recording device? I can’t find it anywhere.”


	6. In The Garden We Wanted.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wanda set aside the scrolls, after another disappointing skim through the Aramaic script.
> 
> \--
> 
> Peter dozes off, a handful seconds before jerking awake to the sensation of cool steel pricking his Adam’s apple.

“The books from Miskatonic University have arrived. The university expects the books to be returned in the conditions we received from them. Without fingerprints,” Vision emphasises, aiming for Rogers’ seriousness, but achieves Banner’s enthusiasm, “I’ve brought _gloves_.”

She doesn’t take her eyes off from salt-scented scrolls laid beneath her hovering palms. “Thanks, Vis. Just put those books in the magick pile.”

The magick pile currently claims half of her bed, with a few books stacking on the floor. The scientific textbooks lay scattered all over her desk.

“I understand the need to tackle the multiverse concept in all aspects. But I think magic or mythology isn’t one of them,” Vision notes, placing the newer books on a chair instead. He removes a day-old coffee cup away from her nightstand. “Of all the theories posited so far, Schwartz and Fox’s Hypertime Multiverse seems to be a likelier candidate for the place you’ve visited.”

“That is which theory?”

“Multiple earths or universes, if you may, exist in the same physical space, kept separate and invisible to each other by differing vibrational speeds.”

“Is that so?”

Vision nods, a mechanical tilt of his head at precisely forty-five degrees angled upwards and downwards. An awkward precision that is both inhuman and robotic. He doesn’t miss a beat, continues, “The other sound alternative is Everett’s Multiverse Theory. Same thing, except this mentions that time-travelling often leads to the creation of newer universes and dimensions.”

Wanda set aside the scrolls, after another disappointing skim through the Aramaic script. No mention of portals or gates to another universe. She sighs, levelling a look at Vision.

“Not all mysteries of life could be explained away by science. Sometimes it is what it is, because of magic. And myths could contain a wealth of information. We just need the right dictionary. Like the Japanese fisherman.”

His metallic red brows knotted together. “What Japanese fisherman?”

“Urashima Tarō. He travelled to the Dragon Palace, somewhere under the sea and spent a few days there. Then when he returned, three hundred years passed. This could be a proof of another universe or dimension existed and time flows differently between two universes.”

Wanda summons her scarlet mist from her fingers, aims at the desk. Scarlet vapour surrounds the desk, lifts a book out from the stack and lingers in the air. She gestures a flipping motion; pages are rapidly flicked through and stops on a specific illustration of a fisherman—trapped in both stages of vibrant youth and withering old age. Pushes the book at Vision.

“Fair point,” he replies, closing the book carefully. “So, during this accidental trip, were you able to use all your five senses to interact with your surroundings or were you merely a visitor to the store?”

She isn’t entirely sure of what is real under her touch, or a figment of an overreactive, frazzled imagination. She remembers the feel of cotton blanket intangibly brushing against her legs, or the durably thin plastic of vintage cassette underneath her fingerpad—but the sensations are streaming rivulets on her palms, fleeting and impalpable.

(But Peter’s lips on hers, tasting mango-flavoured optimism, the rustic pine scent lingering on his scar-less neck, his long-nailed fingers grazing his mark on her spine, him vibrating impossibly fast underneath her. That feels solid. _Real_.)

“I can’t tell,” she says, sipping a newly brewed coffee.

“If that’s the case, I believe you may have projected yourself into the other universe astrally. That would explain why you’re not able to retain long-term memories of your visit there. If you were a reality warper, then I think it would wise to assume that you could enter the universe through a back door.”

“Reality warpers? I thought that is only possible with the Aether. The Asgardians took it for safekeeping.”

“Theoretically, a reality warper could bend reality to its will. Easily entering one universe or exiting one, better yet—create a newer universe or bring another person from their universe to ours,” he says, and she can hear the wonder shimmering in it, as he scans chipped dynastic tablet into his memory data.

Visions sighs, disappointment heavy in his tone. “There is yet to be a record or document of such person or successful dimension travelling, and I’ve combed through all files from SHIELD, HYDRA, CIA, KGB and every acronym I can think of.”

“And you said mythology and folklore aren’t helpful when you found none in science,” she retorts, smirking a victory’s grin.

“I may been too hasty to formulate a premature opinion,” he amends, putting away the tablet and reaches for another.

The sound of manuscripts caressed, tablets loaded into wooden crates and brittle scrolls upfolded and folded, constitutes the bulk of their conversations.

(Wanda tolerates Vision, in the same vein a cat tolerates a human providing sustenance and toys. She’s not proud of it—neither does she cares to change the view.)

Ancient texts blur into squiggly lines and Wanda rubs her eyes, stifling a yawn. Curio for secrets lies hidden within leather-bound tome morphs into wondering thoughts of a silver-frosted haired boy and the paralytic terrors plaguing his nights and his life.

A stray thought breaks loose from tangled knots of uncompromising insanity, incomprehensible lucidity, unreasoning desire, fervent pursuit of the unattainable and emotions she cannot named or fashioned an understanding—a question blooming.

(She cannot ask the muted ghost whose electric-blue eyes are unblinking as his apparition flickers into empty spaces. She cannot ask the boy with her twin’s speed and her brother-lover’s name butchered whose answers she may never want him to utter. All she has is this tin-man and his soul of a stone with impressionable uncanny human eyes and the world experience of a child.)

“Do you think it’s ethically acceptable to displace someone from their universe if it’s for their benefit?”

“If they’re in danger and there is simply no other way to save them, and their existence is vital to the wellbeing of the future of mankind, then I would say it’s morally wrong but ethically sound. However, my personal opinion is that the person should stay in their original universe, to avoid unpleasant consequences to both universes.”

“I see,” she says.

“Then there’s the subject of the person themselves. Will she or he be willing to leave everything behind in their own universe? It is unpredictable.”

“It is.”

But Wanda isn’t allowing Pietro to slip through her grasp again.

* * *

Waiting means counting every single fucking sand grain dropping at the bottom of the hourglass, each one falls like a frozen teardrop. Time flows like the slimes off a snail’s tail. Keep still. Keep still. Don’t lose the only advantage he has.

Peter dozes off, a handful seconds before jerking awake to the sensation of cool steel pricking his Adam’s apple. It’s a dream. Just a dream. Nothing to worry about. That’s the least—

She appears a second shy off midnight, in a translucent nightgown with elaborated laced-neckline hanging low over her exquisite collarbone.

Ghost-like. Divine perhaps. No, she’s the embodiment of waif elegance if he ever had the pleasure to say so.

(He spends his time putting a face to her melodic voice, to her lovely name. And she still defies his expectations. None of his supposed imaginations comes close to her ethereal beauty.)

She’s not a demon.

She’s not an angel.

She’s not a ghost.

(This fact he knows for certain, yet he cannot place a definite reason why he thinks so. Weird.)

Angels, demons and ghosts don’t exist in a world where Apocalypse’s henchman was a boy with cherubic countenance and angelic wings, or in a world where blue fur, amber eyes, hooves for fingers and toes, and a prehensile tail cannot mask Kurt’s humanity is greater than the lot of them.

That much Peter knows.

It’s instinctive to let the world around him to move at a sloth’s pace. Peter darts to his closet, slipping into a Rush tee, patrols the mansion for possible breach. He scours every inch of the mansion, finds none.

She’s alone.

Questions, millions and pilling, bounce off around his skull like the coins in a gambling machine on a jackpot strike. Millions of queries— _each_ and _all_ —slithering away from his rushing grip, writhing cornered snakes vying for escape.

‘Who are you’ flowers in the base of his skull first—but withers; Peter knows the answer.

She’s Scarlet, his _secret_ midnight Juliet.

Only that, nothing more. Boot mark imprinted on the recorder’s glass case, sealed the results of his spy-work with horrible audio findings and corrupted tapes. He played them six times, and by the fifth, barely went beyond her name and pieces of information without context. Conclusion; nil.

“Wow, you’re pale. I mean, in a flattering way, like a porcelain doll but that doesn’t mean I think you’re fragile,” he stammers. “A-and dark-haired. Huh, I always thought Scarlets are redheads.”

He has questions. He really does. But his mouth has a habit of not conveying his thoughts articulately and charming wit escapes him. Peter jams the heel of his palm into his face—fast enough she’s still partially petrified to her spot.

Shapely eyebrows arching into frowning knots. “You _remember_ me?”

“No. Yes. No and yes. Yes and no. From the tapes, we sounded like we knew each other,” he stutters, wishes the ground to open up and swallows him.

Peter smiles, toothy and ears turning the shade of tomato embarrassment, and hastily continues, “B-but I don’t recall you, your voice, your face, your everything. Until tonight.”

“How did you—” she doesn’t finish her words.

She visits. He sleeps, with a toddler’s ease. Always unflinchingly without failure, he wakes and his mind is a blank canvas.

Sometimes, he thinks, nightmares metamorphose into cotton-candy dreams. More holes puncture into his memories, like a Swiss Cheese, and delusions bordering authentic realities filling the cavities.

Realisation slams its brass knuckles into his chest. Of course, she _is_. Think faster, think faster, think like a muscle, a reflex, not a thought.

“You, you’re a _telepath_. Like the professor. How long have you been erasing my memories?” he blurts, harsher and vibrating with rising hostility. Heat spreads from his neck to his spine, like wildfire ravishing dried grass.

“Let me help you,” she says.

He could feel tendrils audaciously twisting around his thoughts, with prodding coils, trespassing effortlessly as a seasoned interloper would.

(This is a—a _violation_. It’s not. It is. She sees— _knows_ his secrets, the ones he hides behind cheery smiles, sarcastic charms and silly expressions. He’s cultivated a meticulous veneer of the chivalrous perverted charmer—supposed to keep him safe from further heartbreaks, mounting disappointments and all that is out to tear him apart.)

“What did you _see_? How much you’ve _read_ my mind? _Tell_ me, _tell_ me, _tell_ me,” he demands, humming as the air crackles with silvery confusion and agitated fidgeting of his hair. Bile rising from the pits of his belly.           

(Deaths. Death by katana to the throat. Deaths. Death by drowning in the lake. Deaths. Death by human hunters out for mutant blood. His deaths. All possible ends to his life, that’s not real too. Those deaths. He’s alive. He’s breathing—his lungs scream for air. Are they her work? He wants—needs to know.)

“Have you been putting _nightmares_ into my brain? Have _you_?” Peter snarls, not taking one step forward to dig his hands into her skin.

Panic constricts his chest in pythonic hold, squeezing each breath he inhaled. Walls shrink. Ceiling racing to kiss the floors. Heart battering against curving bone struts of his lungs.

She rushes to his side, tilts his chin to meet her large mournful gaze in eerie crimson glow. He doesn’t flinch. She’s a stranger—no, she’s not. The ends of her lips quirks into a soothing smile. She urges, “Breath, Pietro.”

“I need some air,” he tells her, weakly and lips drying, throat burning. He knows her, but he doesn’t. His head-there’s something wrong with his head. The X-Mansion is a cage. He needs to be anywhere but here.

“Take me with you,” she says.

He hooks an arm under her legs, and another behind her back, supporting her neck. He darts through the mansion, passes by the sleeping snores of staff and the late last-minute cramping before big exams and pop-quizzes.

He sets Scarlet down at the fountain, hands her a pair of slippers he grabbed from Jubilee’s shoe rack. The breeze on his skin lures adrenaline out from his veins. His heart resumes to its usual humdrum beats, the binding of his lungs falls off like snake shedding skin.

Her presence slips out from his mind until a meek groan alerts him, and a deep breath inhaled eagerly by nauseous lungs.

“It will pass,” Peter assures, eyeing queasiness settling onto her features, a representation of his speed’s abject passenger.

“I-I normally don’t get _this_ ,” she says, sitting on the fountain’s weathered marbled ledge, waves a dismissive gesture at herself. Pretty dark brows furrowing, disappointment sits on the crease of her forehead.

He shrugs. “Happens to everyone when I move too quickly.”

The moon is a splendid glow of sultry yellow, and under it, he notices how  _translucent_ her nightgown really is. Her curves making itself known through the flimsy cotton fabric, and holes teasing him of the same ashen paleness of her skin—nice to know it’s alabaster-white all the way.

“Feeling better?”

Her voice draws his unfortunate gaze upwards, to the smile lining her rose-petal lips.

She tilts her head sideways, wavy dark hair spilling over her chest. She’s terribly enchanting and pretty, Peter decides.

“Peachy, but yeah. What did—”

She’s quick to interrupt him, almost like she knows the streaming of words that leaves his mouth in a trainwreck-like fashion. “Nothing much. I just calmed you down. And no, I didn’t put any nightmares into your head. I soothed them away, or muted them, so you can easily sleep.”

“Oh,” is not the word he wants to say, but it is the one that he ends up blurting. He pauses, trying to mentally run a quick list of appropriate responses, and says, “Thank you. I promise you this will be a one-time thing only.”

“If you say so,” is spoken without malice, and a little teasing, Peter thinks, and he’s ready to lay precious offerings of gold, flowers, jewels and want at her feet.

He lets the silence stretch between them comfortably, lets himself to work through his scattered, scurrying thoughts with detached logical examination, lets Scarlet relish the cricket-led symphony and frogs chorusing along.

“If you have a question, you should spit it out,” she quips, peering at her badly chewed fingernails. “Not keep inside you, until it creates other ailments.”

He plays a one-person ping-pong with his hand for paddle and a pebble for the ball, across the pond, as his own opponent. Moving faster than the world is strangely peaceful, a time where people surrounds him, neither could see or hear him and he’s alone to be himself and think.

(Honestly, he isn’t sure what he wants to ask. Perhaps, there was plenty before, still plenty even after, and yet each one seems so trivial at best. The little glances she discreetly tosses at his direction feels like a request for him to break the silence, and Peter isn’t one to disappoint.)

He lets time flow as it has, stills his anxious limbs; a pasty statue of sprightly thoughts and patterned idiotic grins, gleaming under the mellow moonlight.

“Why me? You can pick anyone here. Anyone who is better, nicer, stronger than me,” he babbles, gaze momentarily slipping from her face to the razor-thin collarbone contrasting against the lucent fabric of her nightdress.

(Somehow, the words are oh so familiar on his tongue, as if they were shaped during nights like these, but farther into the past and he’s not lucid as he is now.)

He rakes his fingers through his hair, pushing his bangs out from his eyes. “Have we _had_ this conversation before?” Peter wonders, raises a brow.

She doesn’t look up, a slender finger tracing swirls on the calm water surface. “Why not you? Do you not feel like you are worthy?” she says, quietly and melancholic guilt seems to balance precariously in her deflections. “Is it important to you to know?”

“I don’t know. I want to know, I guess,” he admits, rubbing the tautness embedded in his shoulders, “I feel like you lied to me before. I just—just think you did.”

Peter doesn’t expect the truth from her, somehow. But he’s keen to accept the possible white lies she offers as the truth. Truth has always been overrated and subjective, Peter thinks. He waits.

She answers eventually, meeting his stare. “I lost someone _dear_ to me.”

Her eyes are not burgundy, or red, or garnet, but . . . sorrowful _green_. Peter expects them to be blue—Wendy’s wintry-blue gaze, but it isn’t. It is jade-green, haunted and beautiful. The colour green isn’t a favourite of Peter’s; but hers—cat-green—is rising in the ranks.

“And you reminded me of him.”

(There is a part of him, okay—the whole of him—wants to kiss the wretchedness chiselled into her delicate features away. Doling the same kisses that Wendy showered on his wounds after fights went nowhere but adding more blue-black to his flesh.)

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he tries, despite how hollow it sounds to his ears and squeezes her hand.

His condolence earns him a wistful curve of her lips and a chaste peck to his temple. “It’s not your fault.”

The breeze drops into languid chill, Peter yawns and yawns into his hands. He carries her back to his room, without a word, and she utters no protest.

“I can keep your nightmares at bay for tonight, or maybe tomorrow. It will not last. But do you want me to?” Scarlet suggests.

He shakes his head lightly. “Nah, this is my problem. Not yours.”

Scarlet vanishes. Peter sleeps.


	7. Better Run For Cover.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes, with a book in hand, steaming tea on her lap; other times, she has tactical battle plans laid beneath her palms and Wanda watches.
> 
> \--
> 
> Peter disarms the mob; empties the clips, piles the machetes and guns in front of Jubilee, plants the rare pitchfork into the ground.

She lingers around the common rom. Sometimes, with a book in hand, steaming tea on her lap; other times, she has tactical battle plans laid beneath her palms and Wanda watches.

Wars are terrible things, marking its survivors with invisible chaotic scars, clawed deep into psyche and so often, fester like sweet rot. So many ways to feed the rot, to have the rot contain in a gilded cage of sojourn.

(She knows her scars intimately as her brother’s butterfly kisses on her shoulders. Pietro’s too. Both the seen and unseen. The rot, hers and only hers, is maddening and luxury of comfort, guides her to the chestnut-eyed Pietro. This is not about her, or them. It is merely her trying to understand the many ways war left its survivors in shambles—and what they do next. Somewhere, there is an answer, Wanda has to _just_ look.)

Clinton Barton retires to a reticent life of normalcy, to the bundle of innocence he calls his children and to a wife who bears the archer’s strength for him and her family. Wanda is one to think the man is content and his ghosts will not hound Hawkeye and his arrows.

She hasn’t seen much of Thor, flaxen-haired, eyes the colour of thunderstorms and vigour of a warrior-king in the making, around. _He’s an alien_ , Pietro sardonically reminds her in her ears, ghost-like snickers, _he comes when the earth is in shambles._ Not when countries are torn apart by its own foibles. Make sense, actually. Thor is an otherworlder, with morality aligns to no one but his own Asgardian—and Wanda isn’t familiar with Norse mythology.

Vision is a lesson in mimicry still cannot mask the fact he thinks with the precision of a scalpel, unhindered by emotions that he— _it_ , Pietro clucks his tongue at her insistence—sections synthetic thoughts and emotions into compartments and delete the comprising errors. His rot is mechanical. He is Pinocchio, and he is not what Wanda needs.

Natasha Romanoff is the better actress, the better mask crafter, the better mask wearer. She hides her scars— _her rot_ —with smokes and mirrors, so believable and perhaps Wanda could have believe it too. Yet her scarlet tells Wanda so, Natasha Romanoff is at peace with her rot and has long to learn to not let her rot takes over her. Black Widow will deny her rot the chance to break her—and the _other_ Pietro was, is, will not be fragile Russian girl honed into a perfect assassin.

Steve Rogers, the man with the blue-and-red shield, is a man lives to inspire and aspire heroism. Yet sometimes there are parts of him, gold-haired, square-jawed and steely blue eyes, are doggedly persistent on death-imminent missions and matters of other kinds take a backseat. Wanda thinks, he is plagued by sleepless nights of doubt and it shines in his single-mindedness, as a halo of barbed wires and stars. Captain America is another American ideal suffering under the gruesome labour of a war that never ends from a period where most aren’t born, Wanda included, to now. It is another trait neither Maximoff, Wanda nor Pietro, shares.

Tony Stark cannot hide the guilt waiting to scream out. Sure, he deflects, through sarcastic quips designed to showcase his intelligence and rile some feathers in impish tickles. Wanda has her scarlet prod his mind before. Saw the attacks, in various shades of panic, overwhelming him, pushing him to create more mechanical suits—even the one that slaughtered _her_ Pietro. And she still sees them in his mind. Stark says one thing, and does another. It costs him much more, Wanda foresees, and he’s a terrible example of dealing with trauma—and Wanda doesn’t need another Pietro so similar to her own Pietro (dead and obsessive), to Iron Man.

“Want a fresh cup of tea? Or hot chocolate?” pipes the one who watches the watcher, surrounded half in shadows and the other with white-teeth gleaming sincerely and inviting, in a large smile.

“I don’t drink chocolate,” is what she says, on short notice, and swallows the next few, _not since I died_ , Pietro supplies, grinning a phantom’s smirk.

Sam parts a nod, curt and understanding. Leaves another cup of tea, fresh and the aroma of camomile permeating the air between them, on the table. He half-turns, again with the smile and summer in his tone, and says, “If you want an ear, I got a pair waiting to listen.”

Sam Wilson is a man, devoid of designed serums to make super soldiers in his veins. Only a pair of mechanical wings that could rival’s the grace of a swan, the fierceness of a falcon and the determination of man driven to altruism. The Falcon spends the time in shadowy corners, observing each woman or man, for a crack fissuring into larger chasm. He is perhaps the stablest one among all.

Wanda ponders, a second or two. The Avengers. They carry their burdens on their shoulders, but they would not understand the lost of a soul shred into half, incomplete and to exist, forever yearning for a time so tumultuous but at least Wanda and Pietro are together, alive and feel the dust settling on their skins like raincoat.

(And truthfully, Wanda knows, this matter of one Pietro and his rot poisoning his silver grins and restless legs, is hers to handle. Hers to seek an answer and she will not find it among the Avengers.)

Her decline comes in the flavour of forced obliviousness. Wanda says, “Thank you, Sam. But I’m fine. I have my tea.”

“Alright. But the offer still stands. Anytime, Wanda.”

“I know.”

(Sam wouldn’t understand, no matter what his cedar eyes say. Because Maximoffs take care of each other. It’s always been them against the world. In Sokovia. In Avengers. In the sprawling different universes in existence. No one understands a Maximoff, a Pietro better than a Maximoff, a Wanda. That is absolute.)

* * *

The screen lights up crazily, multiple dots blinking—almost like the neon lights on Las Vegas casinos or boards of an electric grid on fire. Newer ones popping up, crowding the screen dreadfully instantaneous, one after the other and soon, the outlines fading and out, leaving crooked borders.

“W-what’s that?” Kurt solicits, breaking the sullen silence colonising within the tactical room, and his jaw nearly touching the ground.

Peter knows those misshapen lumps by name. By heart, actually. Barrow, Alaska. Supai, Arizona. Utah. Minnesota. Secluded towns with unpronounceable names and folks noticing new strangers by scent. The places Wendy might have left vanishing footprints, in search for the next everchanging sanctuary when she slips up.

(She inevitably does. Always. It takes one Maximoff to calm the other. Wendy never really believe that. Off she goes, walking down the path of uncertainty and fear, leaving Peter in the shadows, waiting and waiting.)

“Anti-mutant riots,” Peter mutters, transfixed by the flashing lights on the screen. Each one sucker-punches his gut, impaling worry to his haphazard guesses of Wendy’s whereabouts. His pages gone unanswered, and even now, silvery thoughts intoning ‘Wanda’ like desperate birthday wishes.

“What Peter said and much more. These clusters represent the areas where mutants are most vulnerable,” Professor Charles replies, softly and too much weary in it.

Of course, the professor is a man of diplomacy first. Quick to avoid trigger words. After all, words like ‘lynching’ and ‘hunts’ don’t inspire confidence. Not in mutants on the cusp of young adulthood. Like Jean. Like Scott. Like Jubilee.

(But Ororo and Kurt are of different stock. Young as they may be, Peter knows, she’d seen worse in Egypt, where superstition reigns or Kurt and his demon-face turning heads and churning disgust everywhere he goes, and a circus isn’t a stronghold monastery to keep Kurt safe.)

“That’s a lot,” Ororo observes, and for the first time, Peter could hear the slight tremor in her voice.

“It _wasn’t_ always so,” Professor Charles Xavier concedes, a guilty rasp taking form.

Jean’s gazes are sea-glass, unfocussed, and everywhere but never on the screen, “Where do you want us to be?”

“Detroit and Atlanta,” Hank answers, deft fingers—pinkish and ordinary—furiously tapping on the keyboard.

The telepathic professor announces, “Peter, Ororo and Jubilation—”

Jubilee clears her throat, huffing under her breath, “Jubilee.”

“—Atlanta is waiting,” he finishes, with an amused grin curving his lips.

“What is in Atlanta?” Peter queries, cocking a brow.

“The Mulwrays have been recently ousted as mutants. Husband projects electrical energy. Wife could speed or slow down electrons. Out of their five children, two are showing signs of emerging powers, however the nature of their powers is undetermined yet.”

Jubilee sticks her hand high in the air, interjecting, “So, how are we going there?” She jerks her thumb at Ororo and Peter, and sighs, “I can’t fly like Ororo or run really fast like Peter.”

“We’ll drop you three first then proceed to Detroit,” Hank replies. “Suit up and we’ll be leaving in twenty.”

The election of Peter as de facto leader, by the virtue of his age and Professor’s blind faith, doesn’t surprise him. Well, just a tad—but really, between them three, he’s wining the age race by a decade at least.

Scott nearly chokes on his own snort, betting a good five bucks on Ororo to be the team leader. Peter would have done the same. But he’s a fan of the underdogs and Kurt made a convincing and passionate argument for Peter’s age and possible parentage.

(But he doesn’t miss the astonishment, scepticism flickering in eyes bearing the shade of evergreen forest. She’s ever so quick to read him like a picture book, the don’t read’ label entices her more. She must have seen it already. He froze—time ticks, ticks, ticks, and hypothetical blood stains his hands.)

“I told you. See, you would be the team leader,” Kurt gloats, tucking fifteen dollars into the padding of his suit.

He corners Hank at the console, leans over to whisper into blue ears. His attempts for last minute one-to-one pointers garner the generic but sage advice, “do your best.”

“So, what do you want us to do first, boss?” Jubilee says, cracking a light smile, unstraps herself from the seat.

“Cyclops would proceed to call us by our _real_ names first,” Ororo supplies, casting a pointed stare at Scott, contrasting the grin etched on her lips.

“It’s the frown that comes first before everything else,” Jean reminds them, giggling at Scott’s expense.

“Hang it tight, we’ll be coming as soon as possible,” Hank informs, waving before closing the X-Jet’s door.

Atlanta is hellbent on embodying the spirit of the Salem Witch Trials. Switch pitchforks and torches for machetes and shotguns, it’s practically identical, downright to the screaming exorcism of mutants accompanied closely by vandalization to mutant property.

The mob has a family of seven surrounded, encased by a circle of gun-toting and enthusiastic machete wielding citizens.

“I think it’s time for those torches to be retired back to the sixteenth century,” he quips finally, fixing his goggles on.

It’s fairly routine. Simple. Easy. Peter disarms the mob; empties the clips, piles the machetes and guns in front of Jubilee, plants the rare pitchfork into the ground. “You’re up,” he informs Jubilee, fireworks sparking on the metal, melting them away.

“I think everyone forget to bring their umbrellas and raincoats,” Ororo says, smirking and bluntly delighted. Thunderstorm rumbles, lightning crackles in the darkening skies, striking the grounds—nothing serious.

“Okay, back into the house, everybody. We’ll be safer and dried there,” Peter ushers, shepherding the Mulwray family away from their witch-hunters-infested lawn. The last Mulwray child runs after his parents, Peter squints at the skyline.

Ororo lingers at the doorframe, glancing at him. “Where are you going, Quicksilver?”

“’m gonna do a quick run—to see if we got any mutants in need of saving,” he says, flashing a fox’s smile.

He runs through the city, crevices and cracks, backdoor alleys and abandoned warehouses. He runs further than he needs to. Peter has the speed to save, save and save mutants. He runs, without glitches and hitches.

“Andy, _give_ me back my gloves,” someone yells, high-shrilled and fright evident in her pleading tone, halting Peter in his tracks. He follows his ears, tracking the confrontation to an open space across from the Mulwrays’ cosy home.

“You stole this out from my cart, bitch,” Andy, possibly five-eight, tobacco-stained teeth and matted dirty blonde hair, bellows and jabbing a stubby finger at the girl. “You know we don’t steal from each other’s carts.”

She’s tiny, barely reaches Peter’s shoulder, dressed in a stonewashed long-sleeved tee, jeans with more tears than sponges, ragged scarf and one glove fittingly snug on her left hand. “No, I didn’t. I had them before we even met,” she argues.

“Bad things happen to pretty lying girls,” Andy growls, trying to snatch the other glove from her hand.

“Don’t touch me,” she shrieks, shoving him away, and her un-gloved hand strikes Andy’s chest. Her petite face twists into horrified expression; she incoherently demands, “Oh no, no, take your shirt out. Andy, take it out. Throw it away.”

The shirt starts to glow; a sheen of luminescent white shaped like a hand print shimmering. Nothing good ever comes from things that glow, be it blue, ruby, scarlet, or white.

“W-what’s happening?” Andy splutters, neither taking his shirt off nor show any sensible sense to get away from them.

Peter strips Andy off his shirt, falcon-swift and minutes to spare. Cast a sweeping gaze around them, spots a dumpster to his left. He dumps the t-shirt, now burning a hole through his glove, returns to Andy and the girl.

“Fuck, where’s my shirt, bitch? What did you do?”

“No way to treat a lady, pal. But since you’re been extra _nice_ about it. Here, let me take your pants too.” It happens before Andy could blink, Peter grins, sardonic and injects a little threat into his next words, “If you don’t leave now, the boxer’s next. Scram.”

Andy turns around and leaves, flipping a finger at them.

“T-thanks,” she whispers, slipping the gloves on, and tightens the scarf around her neck, takes a few steps at the opposite direction.

“Wait, you don’t have to run away. Come with us. We can help you.”

“You don’t even know what I can do.”

Of course, he does. The dumpster speaks for itself; blasted into pieces, melted plastic fills his nostrils, and his ear drums ring in the aftermath. But she doesn’t need to know that. Pointing out the obvious would only drive her— _her_ —away. They always do—those who fear of their powers.

“It doesn’t matter. You’re one of us. We take care one of our own.”

“No. It’s not safe. No one is safe around me.”

“Only if you think that way. If anyone can help, it’s the professor. I promise you that at least,” he says.

She chews her lips, slow, deliberate. And sighs.

“Beth.”

“I’m Peter,” he offers, extending his clammy hand out.

But when the end of her mouth quirks upwards and Peter thinks, it’s a pretty smile, innocently young and full of hope. She takes it, and Peter smiles back, wide.

Waiting for the X-Jet is immensely uneventful. The Mulwrays are invitingly warm however. Mother, Patricia, offers them sodas and homemade cookies, with toddler Neal attached to her hip. Father, Brennan, tries to pacify his perpetually-tearing son, Caleb. Jubilee’s firework display fascinates the Mulwray twins, Lexa and Leo. Andrea, proudly aged six, somewhat has taken into shadowing Ororo’s movements, and Beth thoroughly amused by Ororo’s exasperation.

“I’ll check the roofs in case they decided to drop in like Santa Claus through the chimneys,” Peter says, draining the last sip of his Dr. Pepper.

A speedster is powerful as only if he’s not distracted, Peter muses. He’s fast, faster than bullets, faster than knives, faster than explosives, faster than sound. But he can never outrun distractions or false security lullabies.

Glass windows shatter into an explosion of cutting shards, guzzles Jubilee’s too-late warning and the bullets fly in erratic directions. Peter rushes the steps, one large jump after the other, lands on the bottom.

He sees another round of bullets hailing through the busted windows.

The Mulwrays all huddled closer. Coils of electric charges sparking from Brennan’s arms, reactive to the danger. Caleb clings tightly to his father. Nearby radio and television sizzling by Patricia’s electrical-like glowing energy. Lexa is half visible, mirroring her twin. Leo’s left side dissipating into dark shadows. Ororo throws an arm over Andrea’s head. Jubilee valiantly fails to peek at their snipers.

He tracks the bullets’ trajectory to a neighbour and his teenaged sons, dressed in camouflage attire and shotguns. No more Nice Mutant guy, Peter decides, and punches them out cold. He bends their shotguns against his thighs. Always, his trusty duct tape to put finishing touches—tying them up against their patio chairs.

“Everyone’s okay?” Peter asks, pushing his goggles above his forehead. “Problem solved. Made sure no more firing will be happening in the near future.”

“We’re fine,” Ororo calls out, coughing. A collective of mumbled ‘yes’ echoes in the room.

“Beth?”

“Get me o-out from here,” Beth says, hands trembling and blood leaks from her neck, dripping in between her fingers.

“It’s just a flesh wound,” Jubilee notes, searching for handkerchief all over her suit.

“No,” Beth sharply retorts, and he sees the same shimmer of white glow peeking out from her sliced skin. “I can feel it. I’m going to explode. And if I do, I’ll take out the entire neighbourhood with me,” she hastily adds, patching her neck wound with his duct-tape.

Peter grabs her and runs. She’s light. The sharp bend of her elbows digging into his ribs, her skin is papery under the receding dusk, and her dainty lips chapped from horrid weather, from crumpled cardboards for roof and walls, and stomach used to eating less than her fast fingers could pilfer.

(Wendy’s heavier when she left, healthier too. And he wonders, if she weights no less like Beth is. Don’t assume, it makes an ass out of him and her too. Her words. Not his. Wendy’s not in trouble. Beth is.)

“Where are you taking me?”

“To Westchester.”

“You won’t make it. We don’t have time.”

Peter grins—tries to—and forces himself to. “I always have time. I’ll run and we’ll be there before you know it.”

 _I’m sorry,_ Professor Charles’ voice echoes in his mind,  _but there isn’t much we can do for her._

He makes the necessary mental calculations. From Atlanta to Westchester. 884.5 miles. 295 hours. Less than that if he’s on his top speed and a fraction of that, if he runs faster than sound. He did before, and he can do it again. He could reach there before she—

 _Peter,_ Charles tells him,  _the mansion isn’t the best place for her._

He isn’t good with speaking internally. Ever. “Why not? You said it’s a haven for people like us,” Peter snarls into the vortex of speed muting his voice to Beth and the world.

_If you choose to bring her here, we cannot contain the blast in time. The mansion will be destroyed. There is nothing else we can do for her. But to make the last—_

“ _No_ ,” Peter cuts off, with a viciousness he rarely shows, “there has to be.

 _Every single cell of her body is explosive_ , Charles replies, and sighs into Peter’s brain and it feels like a tingle in his skull,  _Her body, especially her skin, acts as a containment—_ Peter wishes not to hear more, runs his thoughts at darting speeds.

(There is a fact that lingers unspoken and Peter knows it like the veins on Wendy’s palms, the fear plays in the back of his mind, dormant, like a restless deer. Years of living in the street weakened her ability to contain the unstable explosive energy, and he wonders, if that’s the fate written in his sister’s future.)

His control over his legs slips, bit by bit. Pain corking his muscles into stiff blocks, and ache builds and builds in his arms, jamming invisible needles everywhere. They’re speeding passed the five hundredth mile now. She doesn’t feel it. To her, time is frozen and nothing else seems to move—much less a slow crawl to the finish line.

“There must be something you can do. Help her. Fuck goddaamit, do something, Professor,” he screams into the air, and no one can hear him.

The ground beneath his feet feels like air, yet each gallop wobbles as he touches the ground momentarily. Sweat rolls down his skin, running streams of perspiration like waterfall, and his skin roasting him alive.

It’s seven hundred miles in—and he just wants, _needs_ to breath. He wishes a reprieve from hugging her too tightly, and he thinks, frets over newer breakage of skin under his nails, his fingers left deep imprints on her flesh.

 _We’re not gods, Peter,_ the professor apologises, and hatred taints his blurry, weary eyes and Peter pushes the English-accented voice out, catching the end trails,  _You cannot run forever._

“Give me _three_ seconds,” Peter manages between hard whizzes and shallow inhales of air. His legs are swaying beams of a rickety bridge. She remains steady in his arms; he won’t let her go.

Beth stares at him, and smiles, one that doesn’t reaches the corners of her crinkling eyes.

“Peter, you’re probably the fastest mutant alive. You’ve done enough,” she murmurs, and Peter notices the softness of baby fat still strong on her face, and lips still quirking upwards, resigned and contend.

“I can—” Peter pants, “ _Save_ you, just—I need _three_ seconds.”

He sees the pearly white glow now has seep into her veins, and her once-brown eyes. He drops her on the ground—sudden, abrupt as his arms slack. The apology is caught undeclared by his parched throat.

She rises to her feet, her hand hangs in the air, out to touch his hair, and she withdraws it—then takes his trembling hands in her small, thin-gloved ones. “I’m _dying_. I also know I don’t have a long life ahead. It’s okay, Peter.”

(He’s supposed to be the one comforting her. He’s not dying. He’s the brother left behind. He’s the brother with his powers in total control. He’s the one with the speed to save. He’s not the one who has it together, not falling apart at this moment.)

“No one deserves to die alone.”

She shakes her head softly. “Go. I’ll be fine.”

He pleads, holding tightly to her sleeve, “Let me save you—”

She pries his grip of her sleeve, pats his head. “Goodbye and thank you, Peter.”

Beth smiles. It’s a comely smile, a hint of resignation touching the corners of her lips.

He wants to smile. He does. But he doesn’t.

“Now, run.”

Peter sprints; dragging, forcing each leg to move—one step forward, and forward, and forward. Don’t look back—but he can’t abide by his own words. Tossing a final glance over his shoulder; a blinding white-light explodes, wiping the entire land with white and immense force hurls Peter backwards and his skull smashes against the ground.


	8. My Mind is An Endless Sea.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peter wants to run. Run, run, run. Where will you run, echoes in his mind, distorted between brazenly effeminate and courteously brittle.
> 
> \--
> 
> Wanda stays a little longer, the decision comes easily as kissing sky-eyed Pietro under the ragged covers of war-warmed bed.

When he closes his eyes, sleep doesn’t come. White light flares beneath his eyelids. Charred flesh, scorched grounds, burnt landscape lingers in his lungs and nose. Heat, pain, and flameless fire imprint on his skin. His scream melts into the cavities of his throat, never escaping his mouth. Dirt and damp soil sprinkle over a flat oaken casket—the size befitting for a child of eight years—accompanied by flowers, of silver and scarlet. The receding silhouette of his twin through the crack of front door. Grief contorting the forlorn expression to an alcoholic indulgence.

Peter _begs_ and _begs_ and _begs_ ; _wake_ , _wake_ , _wake_ up. His body hums, faster like the heartbeat of a hummingbird’s wings, and he cannot move. Paralysed. Peter wants to run. Run, run, run. _Where will you run_ , echoes in his mind, distorted between brazenly effeminate and courteously brittle.

“Shsh, you are in good hands,” whispers a voice, accented and soft, and muffled. “Your nightmares cannot hurt you.”

Delicate hands, calloused and nimble, cup his face in a soothing’s caress. Only a touch, unafraid and sympathetic, between skin to skin, and Peter wakes.

Her warmth overrides his instinct, he thinks. The curl of cherry-painted lips into a mollifying smile draws the clawing panic gnawing his chest, his mind away.

Peter keeps still. Her eyes are green as the jades in Chinatown, and he feels like he’d seen them bright and in scarlet red, like her name. But his legs have their own will; spasming at break-neck speed. His chest languishes in the rapid breaths he takes.

“Пиетро, разговарај са мном.”

(Pietro, razgovaraj sa mnom.  _Pietro, talk to me._ It’s almost like Wendy’s wintry-blue eyes gazing back at him, another demand, less of a request. Fatigue messes with his hazy vision. Scarlet.)

Silence.

“Pietro, talk to me. Please,” she repeats.

“There’s _nothing_ to talk about,” rushes out from his throat, he yells, the words he tries to clamp down, terribly brash and seething. She flinches—and regains her composure, as if she’s unfazed by his abrupt outburst.

“T-that’s not what I,” he trails off, mumbling the remaining incoherently.

She presses an ink-tipped finger to his lips, cutting him quiet. “You are tired.”

It’s a mechanism, he decides, as Peter slides into sardonic grin and knots his brows together—a show of amused puzzlement. His legs quiet down to a still. He slurs, drowsiness slipping in and out of his words, “What took you so long?”

“I am not,” she counters, and hovers above his face. “It’s midnight.”

He wastes no time. Tonight, he wants words conveyed in kisses, the scraping of fingernails over his skin and hers. Tonight, he wants be lost in her, to die and revive by worshipping Scarlet’s body seems like the only salvation he has.

Peter pushes his face closer to her, reclines his neck upwards. Frozen with fear spiralling beneath his skin, excitement pumping his heart into frenzy hooves. She leans forward, rests her forehead against his, ignoring the sweat sliding down his temple.

He closes his eyes, automatic response to her own. His breath vibrates, then steadies to match hers. As always, like it is. As it is meant to be. “Thank you,” slips loosely from his mouth, almost a croak, a wisp of relief.

“For what?”

“For being here,” he says, wavering between gratitude and remorse.

He kisses her, first. Her surprise, he feels, through the tiny gasp dissipating faster into the silence. The force of his desire has her hand splaying over his chest, steadying, stopping him. Peter ploughs, undaunted and disregarding her hesitance.

(When you have all the time to notice littlest things, like Peter does, you take note of it. The faltering in minute’s seconds and he knows he doesn’t have her consent. Not like all those times, where he moves, as she mandates it.)

Scarlet relents and he holds her head in his hands, pulling her into devouring kisses. He moves her below him. Long fingers scrape his nightmares onto each crevasse, each line of his despair inscribe on her glorious physique.

Guilt blooms in his diaphragm, stomping on his ribcage. His shame is insignificant, an insipid mewling, to the wants of his heart. It seems like she figures _this_ secret out—embracing him eagerly, as though she’s starved of familiar affection.

Almost, almost she wants _this_ as bad as he does.

Each time he does this exploration of wonders, he discovers something new—a thin scar beneath her right ear. Roots, dark and the shade of varnished wood, emerging.

(Deep, deep, deep, Peter pushes Beth’s desolated smile into the blackest corners of his mind. Wendy’s unspoken goodbye and receding shadows through ajar door, Peter lets Scarlet’s teeth between his earlobe to smudge that image away. Her fingers twirling his silver strands snuffing the fraying thought that he would never see Talia’s goofy grin on a perpetually tender face of seven years.)

Somehow, he could feel it in the marrows of his spine, the calm curling around the base of his restless mind. Their coupling climaxes, and _eclipses_ his pain—and it’s all her.

She runs her lips along his neck, murmurs into his hair, “You should not keep all your thoughts to yourself. From everyone else, yes. Not me,” and her fingers dancing on his temple, light humour-guided taps.

“I was thinking,” he mutters, right as his stomach howls. “Fancy midnight supper?”

“At this hour, it should be pre-breakfast,” she says, rising to slip back into her nightgown. “But please lead the way.”

“Wear my clothes, not that I’m imposing, but it’s gotta to be freezing outside around this time,” he tells her, eyeing her nightgown with a pout. He picks denim pants and slips a Queens’ tee over his body.

“Ae you a pancake girl or the waffle type? Personally, I love them both. I eat a lot. All that running takes out a lot of energy. So, I gotta eat. You’re a guest here, my honoured one. Got any favourites and I can bring you anywhere you want.”

She selects his Rush tee out of his many coloured shirts lying neatly inside his closet. Opting for his fresh boxer, she grins, cheeky and borrows a pair of flip-flops far too large for her feet. “Now,” she says, twirling and beams, “Surprise me.”

He takes her miles outside of Westchester, into the Appalachian Mountains, to a diner sorely needed of a modern update on its fifties aesthetic look. It’s a diner that Peter holds dear, never mind the roof leaks and the tiled floor is all cracked and grim-coloured.

“Your tastes are certainly,” she pauses, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear, and a toothy smile for show, “ _peculiar_.”

“I know it isn’t fancy, not what some one-eyed jock would bring you to. But I swear the food here is good.”

The cashier is a man, weathered and lined, with a spine so bent Peter thinks it’s a chore to look upwards. But Peter knows, the cashier will try and succeed crooking his neck, and that lop-sided grin warms his hummingbird heart into a steady beat.

“Peter, we hardly see you around these parts anymore,” the cashier greets, waggling his sparse eyebrows, “and I see you have a beautiful woman. Sister?”

He darts to the cashier’s side, slinging his arms around the shorter man, gently squeezing and smirks, “Nah, this ain’t her, Smithy.”

Smithy flits an inquiring gaze, moving his sight from her feet to her face. The smile on his wrinkled face doesn’t diminish. “A special friend?”

Peter shrugs, glancing at Scarlet, “Are we—are you special friend?”

“You should order food,” Scarlet replies, the ends of her rose-coloured lips curling into a coy smile, “I cannot stay long.”

“Yeah, she’s special,” Peter says, “The usual, Smithy.”

“You kids make yourselves comfortable, I’ll get to cooking,” Smithy answers, limping into the kitchen.

Peter chooses a booth at the corner, tucked away in the far end, almost obscured by dust-coated fake potted palms. Scours his pockets for a couple of quarters, he splurges all of it into the jukebox machine.

(It’s automatic. The song he goes for. Chosen by fingers he has no control off, guided by troubled memories. The tune Talia belted in mumbled words and energetic shouting. The melody once Wendy would laugh carefree, carrying the song on her voice alone. It’s too late to choose another, when he catches the first chords.)

“May I have this dance?” Peter asks, extending his hand. He folds an arm over his waist, bowing. He thinks quietly, as the music fills the empty diner, just maybe tonight he could afford to dip his toes into damned memories.

Scarlet tilts her head sideways, staring into his offered palm—and perhaps into his soul, too—and slaps her hand over his. “One dance,” she says, letting him pull her out from her seat, “only one.”

“That is all I asked for.”

They sway to the music, one foot taken back, another foot takes the empty space. He rests his chin on top of her head—Wendy’s far too tall for such dance, Talia giggled through the not-waltz—and his hand rests around her waist (and it is simply too natural this intimate gesture).

“Spill what ills you, Pietro.”

“Peter,” he corrects, instantly and swallows his sigh.

She pulls away, just enough to cast a side-eyed glance. Dark brow arching, lips flatten to a straight line. A look that is both mild surprise and sparkling curiosity.

“Nobody calls me Pietro anymore. Not even my mum. My sister does. But that’s getting rare and if she’s annoyed.”

“A sister? Is she a twin?”

“Yeah, she is. Lucky guess. Ah, Smithy’s finished with our food. Sit, I’ll get the food.” He sprints into the kitchen, grabs the tray and the plates, balancing them perfectly on his forearm. “Rest up,” he urges, yanking a chair into the kitchen for Smithy to sit.

He prepares the table, setting it up in a poor imitation of a high-end restaurant. Then ushers Scarlet to sit, drapes a crinkled napkin over her lap. Peter slides into his seat, tying the napkin around his neck.

“Has anyone ever told you that you’d make a mean ballerina?” Peter questions, inserting a line of thought before she steers him back to her unanswered inquiry.

She gazes at him, sceptical and permits herself a small smile, “You dance with the grace of a flamingo.”

“I have you know I was the best dancer in my hometown,” he hotly counters, smirking.

“I believe there is room for improvement yet.”

Their meal is taken and shared between stolen glances, over comfortable silence and the rising dawn filtering through the lined shades glinting on their wrists.

“I must leave soon,” she says, twirling the spaghetti with her fork. “I have overstayed my welcome.”

“So, you got a day job—is that a secret too? The type of please don’t ask, or you’ll have to kill me if you tell me.”

Scarlet shakes her locks lightly, and beams a soft smile. “No. And if I tell you, I can never kill you.”

“Because I am too cute? I jest. You better go.”

“I will, after I clean my plate.”

* * *

Wanda stays a little longer, the decision comes easily as kissing sky-eyed Pietro under the ragged covers of war-warmed bed. Each bite she takes and sips of her milkshake are deliberate and measuredly slow.

This Pietro—Peter, his bouncy voice reminds her—is lacklustre. Fragile. As if he holds the weight of the world on his narrow shoulders. The haunting shell-shocked looks of her fellow Avengers imprinted on the contours of his delicate face.

(She is used to crooked half-grins of her Pietro. Knows how this clean-shaven Pietro has mastered a lifetime of smiling masks. And to see him slipping, to feel his desperation vibrating through his fingertips—confuses her.)

Her scarlet prods his silver-racing thoughts, and he’s adept at noticing her intrusion. Yet, as she treads along the blazing emotions and hears his havocked contemplations, Wanda could not find vehement resistance. She slinks into his mind, through the fortified gates of twisted silver, snake-like and silent.

His mind is in shambles, Wanda finds and the revelation bleeds dread. He feels broken. And all she has to offer is her best bear hug, burying her nose into his chest and hollow consolation, “What makes you tired, makes you stronger. But do get some sleep.”

He doesn’t say a word, just merely both eyebrows rising together, as he sips his soda and tawny eyes wide as quizzing moons.

Wanda shakes her locks sideways, jamming her fork into half-bitten meatball. “Never mind. It’s a Sokovian proverb.”

(He leans over the jukebox, eyes the selection with subdued nostalgia. His firm buttocks in her view. Oblivious to her attention. Wanda extends the tendrils of her scarlet mind to his; forging sightless, endless twine to Pietro’s ever buzzing thoughts and tempestuous feelings. Her own private connection to this lover-twin. One to replace the withered link once kept her soul aflame. She’s grasping the link tighter than ever.)

She leaves just before the sun sits higher above the horizon, where the skies are smudges of apricot and periwinkle blue. Fading into her universe, all the while he stands by the counter, nimble fingers performing quasi-magic parlour tricks.

Her room—the one bereaved of colourful rock music posters—reflects the noon sun spilling all over her. She’s still decked in his Rush tee and his chequered boxers, but her feet are bare and her hair reeked of stale smoke gathered in diner’s red-white ceiling.

Five knocks come first, in equal beats. Metallic mouth phased mid-way through her door, only mouth and nothing else. “Morning, Miss Maximoff—although I believe the proper term should be noon. I brought brunch.”

She rolls off from her bed, pacing to her closet. Discarding Pietro’s—Peter’s clothes on the bottom of her drawer, with the rest of Pietro’s bullet-ridden attire. His dust-blackened shoes. Her sight lingers, and Wanda remembers things she wishes she doesn’t.

She slams the drawer close, deciding on yesterday’s slacks. Sprays enough perfume to mask the scent of another Pietro on her.

Another knock. Terse. “Wanda, are you feeling alright? It is unlike you to oversleep,” Vision adds at her non-reply.

She hasn’t sleep all night. “Unlike me to oversleep?”

“Yes, you are usually awake prior to eight, in time for breakfast.”

“Have you been keeping an eye on my movement?”

“Oh no. I-I was merely concerned,” he stammers, and Wanda finds it a little endearing at the dawning horror of realisation in his tone, “Not in a stalkerish sense.”

She cracks the door half-open. Brunch—pancakes and honey syrup in a tray—smells amazing. But her belly is full of spaghetti, meatballs and milkshake. She politely declines. “I am not hungry. Now, what warrants your presence and decision that I should be getting the breakfast in bed treatment?”

“We have briefing at 1300 hours.”

“I’ll be down shortly.”

Wanda’s on a chartered plane to some country she barely knows exist on the fringes of frost mountains and cloud-mists offer protection from prying satellite eyes. The flight is rocky, riddled with turbulence and empty assurances of safety. The dirty window remains partly shut, leaving Wanda only a small view of sparse vegetation and pockmarked stones.

Wanda quickly assumes her position. Playing the role of a British tourist fleeing from heartache of a broken engagement, who might simply find her next love in a dashing American citizen working for the peace corps.

She stays on the mark’s movements. Accidental stumbles into the identical nail parlour, same cosy local restaurant, and even books the same taxi. _Ridiculous_ , she tells the American man, with dazzling sheepish smiles. _Coincidences_ , he replies, _but let’s try a date sometime._

(Still she finds her attention on her mission fleeting. It circles around him hawk-eyed and magnetised. The scarlet link, tethering his silvered mind to hers, hums with tacit unnerving manic. It is hustling harder, louder, and begging for a reprieve. It turns her blood to cold dread.)

She losses the mark in the bustling market, five seconds too long, and Black Widow’s silent reproach makes itself known through Wanda’s earpiece, a tiny, short huff.

She finds the mark again at the fruit stand, unaware of Wanda’s shadowing. This time, Wanda doesn’t lose the mark at all.

(But she cannot let the worry taking root. Distractions will only have the other Avengers, even The Vision digging deeper into her affairs. No. She pushes the thoughts out, and focus.)


	9. Take Me To Your River.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Practice doesn’t stop, and weeks after his body healed and Peter no longer walks—runs funny, he’s suited up in brand new uniform of gold and blue and trusty silver goggles.
> 
> \--
> 
> There is so much sadness she can take. Pitted against this twin-lover of hers, another Maximoff, her resolve crumbles like Troy under Greek’s devious trickery.

Practice doesn’t stop, and weeks after his body healed and Peter no longer walks—runs funny, he’s suited up in brand new uniform of gold and blue and trusty silver goggles.

(He doesn’t tell Kurt that he could still smell the charred flesh—might be his, might be Beth’s. Or report to Hank that he feel the ache in his once-broken leg blazing like a solar flare. They will never understand. They got ghosts of their own to fuss about.)

The scenario of one they practiced countlessly. The dummies are the same, bearing different faces sure, but their essences are artificial. Sometimes there are sentinels. Sometimes they are the Brotherhood of Mutants—strangely never the iteration of the brotherhood in its fledging phase. The professor can’t bear to bring himself to stare into the faces of once-students and could-have-been-comrades.

(He doesn’t worship Charles. He still does. A little. Not fervently as he once was an idealistic thieving teen. No, he keeps this to himself. But Jean—well, he thinks Jean can’t resist listening in. If she knows, she has a mean poker face.)

They were the originals, Peter thinks, and he knows Hank tries not to flinch once when the iteration came up. _A glitch,_ Hank informs via the speakers, changing the scenario into the latest version of the Brotherhood.

This time, there is no pixie-winged mutant with sultry cheekbones, or a demon-faced mutant dripping in crimson—looks so much menacing than Kurt or a mutant with powers matching his tidal powers or an equally-rivalled diamond-encased telepath.

Magneto—Erik Lehnsherr—Henryk Górski—former Apocalypse henchman—literal mutant terrorist—his biological father—whatever he fashions himself these days, is a steady figure. Always on the forefront of every duplication of the Brotherhood in the many scenarios the professor made them participated.

His fellow Brotherhood mutants are a ragtag of a looming man with leonine mane, sharp teeth and wedged-shaped talons, a shorter man more toad-like and dark goggles of his own, and a man generating duplicates faster than a hungry tribble.

Peter runs. What _else_ he’s good for, but running. He sprints—like he did before. Like he has a thousand times, since his messy coffee-hued hair went bleached pewter overnight, his voice cracked from its twelve-year-old throat.

He is a silver blur at the periphery of everyone’s sights and thoughts. He lands a punch at the first duplicate man he sees, socks another punch at the gut of the second replicate man and it continues.

Jubilee and Kurt team up to tackle Toad. Kurt’s teleportation edges the margin slightly to their favour—still, Toad twists, turns and somersaults with the flexibility of a super gymnast, avoiding Jubilee’s aims and knocks Kurt off the roofbeams with his absurdly long tongue.

Scott, Ororo and Jean agree they got the strategy to trounce Magneto and his magenta helmet. Whatever. Magneto isn’t real. Not the ever-present father he and Wendy used to fantasise. The real Magento is far vicious—won’t hesitate to strike down adolescents hindering his goals.

Scott yells, “End him, Jean.”

(One moment, he’s airily punching duplicated men left, right. The dome mimics the palette of stars-studded skies and computer-generated lampposts providing the sparse lighting. He’s decked in yellow-blue uniform, designed in large X pattern.)

“Finish him off,” Ororo echoes.

(Next, the smog of shelled clay buildings fills his lungs. The desert skies are wild and unnaturally grey, magnetic planes erratic under the control of a grieving man. He’s dressed in black-flint scheme; a uniform barely fits his body. Peter’s trapped. Again.)

Peter runs. Faster. Harder. Vibrates insanely fast. Buzzing until the stones, mud and compact ground would shatter underneath the force of his pulsating legs. Run, run, run. Don’t think. Run. Run. Run.

That crazed purple-skinned monster is behind him, growing larger by the second. His katana-yielding henchman, in that indigo leotard, chasing Peter. Both crave his neck. For slaughter. For sadistic glee. Don’t think. Run. Run.  _Run for your life, Pietro._

(He feels flickering ginger tendrils blindly groping around his mind. Less elegant than scarlet vines so often encroaching his mind. Weaker, it stumbles to grasp on his racing thoughts, to edit his mind. Peter oscillates his mind faster than the tendrils could keep up.)

He doesn’t stop. Keeps on running. And—Peter trips. Rolls. Lands on his stomach. Smashes his forehead against the floor.

“Peter, are you okay?” Hank questions, over the microphone.

Kurt teleports to his side. Holds out a hand for Peter, getting Peter back to his feet. “Slowly, Peter. I think you knocked your head a bit.”

“I’m okay, if anyone’s asking,” Jubilee quips, shivering and pale lips quirking into a cheeky smirk. “And I think you can kill the low temp, Ororo.”

“What the _shitting_ hell, Maximoff?” Scott bellows, fixing his visor on. “Are you trying to kill _fucking_ us?”

(He can almost hear the accusing tone in Scott’s admonishment—Magento kills; the apple doesn’t fall far away from the tree. Peter always hated that idiom with the strength of a million nuclear bombs. But, but, but Summers isn’t all talk.)

“I’m sorry, guys. I-I didn’t notice. Foggy goggles,” Peter fires back, insipidly.

“That’s a shitty excuse, Maximoff.”

So, this is how it goes. First names are untouched, pounce straight for the jugular, for the surnames.

“Come on, Summers. He didn’t mean it,” Ororo rebuffs, folding her arms over her chest.

Kurt slips himself in between Scott and Peter, towering over them both, raises his hands up to stop Scott from lunging for the cloud-haired man. “Chill, Scott. It is only a stimulation. No need to get your knickers in a twist.”

“That’s an English idiom, Kurt,” Jubilee stage-whispers, to which Kurt replies a deflated “Oh.” She, elects to keep herself neutral, waving the metaphorical Switzerland flag, is a smart girl Peter doesn’t give enough credit for.

Pretty Jean is silent through the entire ordeal. A sigh here. A sigh there. She tugs Scott away from Kurt. Cyclops and his one-eyed righteous fury sidestep Kurt, stalks up to Peter anyway.

“I get it that you’re older. But you’re reckless and it’s cute the first time. That shit gets old for the fifth time, by the way,” Scott hisses, jabbing his forefinger against Peter’s chest. “That doesn’t work in real life. Or you’d be dead like my brother.”

Jean corners him right after he wrapped a towel, and water dripping into the carpet from his shaggy hair. It’s an illusion, he knows. He doesn’t sniff a trace of sweet lily perfume that usually announces the presence of the flame-haired nosy mind-reader.

“Peter.”

He doesn’t need—want this private reprimand.

“Just don’t tell the professor or Hank.”

“He _already_ knows.”

“Well, I’m _not_ ready for him yet.”

Jean sighs. And she fades from his view.

Later when he gathers his courage to review the footage, Peter stares, transfixed and he is unrecognisable. A demon-possessed, if such thing exists. A man with his wits partially-lost to delirium and dogged night terrors.

Horror slinks into his belly, coiling in acidic sourness and repulsion. He pages Wendy ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty . . . and _loses_ counting.

Wendy never calls back.

(Peter drums his sticky fingers against his thigh once more. The pain doesn’t leave him.)

* * *

Wanda traces his outline, arched and knees drawn closer to his chest, at the edges of the lake, and there are forest stretching miles into the obsidian incessant night. Nothing to give him away but silver locks shine dull through tightened fingers.

(She does not send her scarlet to prod his mind. She feels, instantly, within her bones and chest, of his silver emotions deteriorating into a chaotic and trackless tornado.)

He rocks, like a swinging pendulum. The hazy mellow moonglow glinting on the curve of his cheekbones; tears clung to his lashes—he swipes them hastily away.

The desire of barrel at him, in lightning footwork akin to her best silver twin’s pace, and to wrap her arms around him, is an impulse digging claws into her skin. She still holds a semblance of willpower. Wanda observes.

(His subdued despair tastes like self-pity—and much more; oh too foreign to her tongue. She cannot find the feeling in her Pietro; her sky-eyed speedster isn’t born with cracking silver speed bounded to his being. Her Pietro is a product of a mad scientist’s wet dream brought to life and knows—knew the consequences. Self-pity has no bearing for a twin in which Wanda is the world, and her words, wishes and desires, are his laws.)

She’s used to his vibrancy. The humming of silver sparks in the air—just before he darts beyond eyes—natural or digital—could track, only rippling soundwaves as fleeting proof. Now, fatigue cambers his shoulders into weary flaccid arches.

His sobs muted into the crisp night’s cacophony silence. He does not move. His arms hugging himself tighter, and his head in between his knees. If Wanda squints, tilts her chin upwards—she swears it’s Pietro she sees—after days of high alert, hunger and the night is a cool breeze, and Wanda remembers that was the first foray into pilfering cigarettes from freezing patrolmen.

There is so much sadness she can take. Pitted against this twin-lover of hers, another Maximoff, her resolve crumbles like Troy under Greek’s devious trickery.

She lifts her scarlet veil beguiling his sense. Twitchy fingers lightly rustling of nearby low leaves, announcing her presence.

“Hey,” Wanda says.

He’s whirlwind quick, erases his tear stains with his sleeve. His lips quirk into a thin-lipped smile, and his tawny eyes isn’t sparkling warm. “Woah, you’re like way too early, ya know,” he greets, pretends to check his wristwatch, “Heck it’s not midnight yet. Miss me that much?”

She grins. “It is _midnight_ , Pietro.”

“Peter,” is instant, but he is affably polite in his correction.

“It is midnight, _Peter_.” His chosen name feels jagged and crude uttered by her lips; it doesn’t diminish the width of her grin.

“Pietro makes you sound like my sister when she’s not a happy camper.”

He pouts; the dark rings are imprinted underneath his rum-coloured eyes—a contrast to his showy annoyance.

She could easily warp his saturnine pain into a maple-coated dream, distant memory she would lock so deep in his mind and its existence only appears in the future as pleasantries. But she doesn’t. Not anymore.

She wouldn’t utter this sentence, Wanda muses, if the Pietro in front of her, is scratching his scruffy coal-coloured stubbles and eyes bearing colour of cobalt-blue glistening. “B-but I can always come back—”

“ _No_ ,” he says, too quickly and pitch shrilly than she’s familiar with. “Stay, please.”

It’s barely a step forward she makes; he flinches, fumbles to amplify the space between them. Wanda holds her tongue. Neither taking another step closer, nor moving away; she sits, mimicking his pose.

It’s a while before words are muttered. Even so, Wanda summons her scarlet, circling around hands, like comical pink rabbits galloping over low fences.

“This side of the forest is unfamiliar to me,” Wanda notes, casts a scrutinising gaze at their surroundings.

“It wouldn’t be a secret hideout if everyone knows of this place.”

The cherry-hued mist curls around a smooth flat rock, tossing the rock across the lake. It glides for several steps and sinks. She persists in this futile activity; he finds his shoelaces are far interesting.

Several rocks safely on their way to the bottom and a few precariously stacked on the grass like wobbly weathered Jenga wooden blocks, she stops. Perhaps she is tired of his refusal to speak. Perhaps she herself has secrets she wished to spill.

(Wanda cannot recall the last time she eases her secrets onto Pietro, while blanket half-covers their intertwining bodies, and her chin on his broad chest. His thick fingers playing with her hair. There was never a need for words to be exchanged between one soul, two minds. Nonetheless, it is cathartic and she loves the impatiently theatrical quality of his voice.)

Either way, her lips are loose and she confesses, “I was not always capable of _this_. In the earliest days of receiving this gift, they nicknamed me ‘unvorhersehbar’. German word for ‘unpredictable’, they said.”

He chuckles, but the brittleness remaining. “That’s not very creative. Weird sense of humour, I guess.”

“They’re scientists.”

“Right, creativity is wasted on them.”

“Not entirely. The learning curve was excruciatingly slow. They tried various methods, to expand and strengthen my control. Those were unsavoury times. But it worked for a while.”

The coast falls silent; her heart skips a beat or two—has she misspoke, wrong words that incur his silence, instead of letting him confess at the altar of a Maximoff twin; Wanda holds her breath.

“Control,” he says, stretching the syllable and scoffs. “What a joke. It’s just an illusion, ya know. I was supposed to be the one in control. I run fast. I’m not the one with powers that sometimes exploded for no reason, or powers that are unexplainable. I run fast, and that’s just it. I can control that. Always have.”

(The secrets he spent months caging within himself, now fester and poison his powers. The tension is thick, and the cool zephyr turns placid, Wanda could choke on it. Still, she quiets down her itching scarlet tendrils. Only because he asked her once, no more meddling with his mind. And so, she doesn’t. The request of a Maximoff weighs heavier than all the humans in the world.)

“I’m supposed to save people when there’s no time. I just need three seconds. Now, I can’t even do that. Today, I nearly killed my friends. Me, almost-killer,” he mumbles through his words, reedy and broken—it shatters her to hear him. “Nightmares, nightmares—I just want to sleep.”

Wanda could not go beyond three words, “Sufferers of PTSD—”

“ _No_ fucking way,” his voice is a whip lashing the air in angry pangs, “That only happened to boys who survived Vietnam. I read. I’m not a fucking idiot. I was never a soldier. War wasn’t my thing, all that blood and gore, no, sir, thank you. Never got drafted. Miles away from that stupid war.”

She scoots closer to him. Takes his trembling pallid hands in her rugged ones, and holds them tenderly as she could. “It doesn’t always happen to soldiers, Peter,” she offers; Wanda can’t find the words at all.

“Make it stop. You’re a psychic. Do something. Anything,” he hisses, but really it’s charitable to believe he’s asking, “Make those stupid fucking dreams disappear.”

She _knows_ what he wants. This request of his is an anticipation finally come to fruition. Only it is more than she would ever do. To erase a lurid dream is not the same as to convert a nightmare into fluffed hallucinatory dream. One she could do without worry to cloud her judgement. The other, is one she swears off from performing.

“What you are asking of me, I cannot do that,” Wanda apologises, profusely and deeply, as honest she would in the face of her lover-brother.

He’s gripping her hands tauter, the strength of a castaway clinging to a floating lifeline and desperation flows within his bloodshot eyes. She is weak, against the reediness of his being, the despairing pleas mottling his sallow throat.

(But Wanda remembers what Hydra had her do. The people after that _psychic_ mock-of-a surgery, only shells of their former selves. Fearless. Reckless. Dead. She already has one Pietro dead. She’s not about to have another Pietro dead. She cannot do this again.)

She persists a little longer, to dissuade him from begging her to trod the pathway she will willingly traipse—if he asks her again. “It is the one thing I cannot do. Not to you, Peter.”

“I don’t lose control. Not me. I _can’t_. I don’t _kill_ people,” he snarls, and his fraying voice could break glass ceiling on its volume alone, “I’m not _him_. My mother doesn’t need another kid dead, while the other is a hermit in god knows fucking where.”

This snippet of his tangled past and its ugly revelations hammers surprise into her chest. She’s privy to many things in his life—emotions, thoughts, fears, hopes, dreams—yet his history, his family are mysteries she neither bother to unravel nor simply too selfish to care.

She thinks the silence lasts a minute, and four seconds, if precision is accounted. But she cannot count the ticking seconds over the rushing beats of her heart and the troubled deep bustling of his hummingbird heart.

“I’m sorry I shouted at you. It-I-That’s not very chivalry of me. Wendy—she thinks I could do better than being a jerk. Jerks don’t get anything, but _karma_ ,” he mumbles, a laugh so forced and cracked that it rings harshly hollow. He wrings his fingers together; fingernails digging into his ivory-white skin and nick his skin red with welts.

Wanda bites her lower lip. It’s not her place to say anything yet.

“This story ends up with two endings. Either that’s three kids six feet under or Tatiana Maximoff died surrounded by empty beer bottles and in her own vomit. No happy endings for us, Maximoffs.”

He derisively snorts.

(She’d lost the inquisitive nature to dissect the differences between this universe and hers. Easier to do. All these examinations left a bitter aftertaste, resentment-tinged bile in her mouth, in her chest. Wanda had long accept to hers is the rotten, wretched one. This is the shiner and greener grass. Now, her resentment, her envy, her rage is misplaced.)

“I don’t want to leave the X-Men,” he concedes, in low murmurs.

“Hush now. You will not ask me of this again. You have my help,” Wanda says, after exhaling loud.

Her previous umbrage ebbs away, slinking eels escaping into the river from stagnant lake. This Pietro is falling apart. The universe is fair, she thinks.


	10. Shock Me Like An Electric Eel.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wanda sees minds in pictures and ever-changing colours. 
> 
> \--
> 
> Peter tries. With the fleeting attention he’s born with. To clear his mind.

The Baron once pondered that mind manipulation is a scientific process. Anything _scientific_ can be replicated in the lab, Dr. List believed. It’s all about the brainwaves, he told the Baron over PowerPoint presentations and truly undrinkable coffee. Alpha. Beta. Gamma. Theta. Wanda drowned in the unfamiliar terms, large words and her confusion spiralled.

Telepaths don’t change minds magically. Never have. Dr. List is adamant on that fact. It’s about inserting a thought into a neuron and let that neutron travel, and soon, the action takes place. Simple. Elegant. _Scientific_. Easier to explain, she guessed.

Each brain has its unique frequency, she recalled, match that signature frequency, you’ve _unlocked_ the door to their mindscape. If she encounters resistance, the door’s locked and windows shut—she sometimes did, just change the language—insert new command into the brain through neutrons and the door is open. Simple. Elementary.

Still, it’s all abstract and imaginary constructs. _Scientific my ass_ , Pietro snorted, in paltry English once when Dr. List droned, trying to hammer the finer nuances of mind-reading into Wanda’s fatigued attention. As though he was the one to achieve such feat.

Theories aside, whatever it is she does to these poor minds, hinges on her visualisation and creativity, she thinks. The mind is indeed a complex thing, the Baron mused and she sadly agrees.

Wanda sees minds in pictures and ever-changing colours. Sometimes it is houses, relics of comforts. Other times, it is landscapes and shifting weathers to match temperaments. Rare occasions, she ditches the imageries and goes clinical, with three-dimensional brain scans.

There are lessons Wanda stumbled upon or actually crashed headlong after botched projects Dr. List thrusted her fledging abilities to perform. _It is far easier to manipulate the mind, if it’s a healthy mind than a fractured mind_ —six dead trauma-riddled soldiers and two technicians escaped unscathed. _It is much easier to destroy or even damage a healthy mind, than to heal a broken one_ —there’s a shallow-dug mass grave for pristine-minded enemies died wrecked and another burial grave for tormented soldiers with less good days.

She used to envy Pietro. Tiny bit. The freedom to run beneath the sun’s spring-warm shine, tuffs of alabaster white spread across lazy blue canvas in crazy fun shapes and the grass soft beneath his bare feet.

(He spent hours and hours racing against his own. Beat his record. Again. Not fast enough. He barely put a dent on the sound barrier, the scientist commented and Pietro learnt disappointment is a treacherous emotion. A jet can go faster, whispered one of his instructors. Her lover-twin is whipped for his shortcoming. Tomorrow, he shall heal and race again. Those nights, she rewarded his efforts, kissing his aches away and her scarlet wheedled its way into the minds of his tormenters and their listless nights began.)

Wanda peruses the manual she printed, none of which provides her a shortcut or instant cure. She isn’t one to repeat Dr. List’s protocols. Not for him. Nonetheless, her word is given to a Maximoff. There’s no rescinding her promise.

She tears her eyes away, briefly settles on his face. He’s lying flat on his back, head on her crossed legs. “Are you ready, Pietro?”

“ _Peter_.”

Wanda inhales, auburn curls shaking. “Right, Peter.”

“How do we do this? What do you want me to do? Clear my mind? Meditate?”

He is impatient. Cranes his neck to snatch a glimpse of the manual. His legs twitching—vibrating at its silvery-lightning speed. Yet he seems to be entirely unbothered by the wind conjured by his kicking legs.

She tosses away the manual. Stares at the blue-green veins of her palms; scarlet wisps flitting between her fingers. “No need for that. Your worst memories,” she pauses, returns her sight on the manual, “We will work on them. I cannot erase them, but what I can do, expose you to it, until you learn to confront it and move pass it.”

“Will it work?”

“I do not know,” she says, and it’s the truth.

“Groovy,” he grins, and she could pick up the fear stretched taut in his cheery tone, “Let’s do it then.”

(Frankly, do this mind-altering _long_ enough, it becomes secondary, a muscle flexed involuntary. Give _it_ a little time, it’s child play and concentration are rendered redundant. It is not an accomplishment she wants to gloat about. There have been many, many, many minds. None of them are her Pietro’s.)

“Close your eyes. Count to zero from ten.”

Wanda tunes out his voice, focuses on his breathing instead. Scarlet mists circling her hands descend on him, wrapping him in crimson silk cocoon. Wanda breaths. Synching her breaths to his rhythm.

_In, out, in, out, in, out—_

She’s in.

There is a house sitting on top of a tranquil sleepy hill, surrounded by limitless verdantly wild meadows. Steep-pitched roof with red-white brick gable wall along the fascia line. Two arched windows on its egg-shell walls. A long wooden-platform porch running along the house’s side. It’s quaint and tickles Wanda’s own memories with melancholic nostalgia.

This is the first she walks down the sprawling landscape of his mind, without resistance.

The décor isn’t what she expects from a house so traditional in its outer appearance. It is richly inhabited by asymmetrical furniture, circular psychedelic-patterned rugs and boxy electronics, presumably designed after vintage sixties home catalogue. Charming almost, and an array of oak-framed photographs of twins with identical grins.

Nearly every inch of the walls is littered with various photos. Some taken in black-white scheme. Of an elderly couple stepped in traditions and displaying garnishment of their birth rights. Of a slender girl on the cusps of summer adolescence, in polka-dotted circle dress. Of idyllic fifties postcard replicated with smiling twins standing in front of their mother.

Wanda stops. Turns her attention to a family portrait hung on the wall. A family of four—that itself isn’t odd. Her own was four-membered; мајка, отац, ванда, Пиетро. This portrait has mother, Pietro, sister and . . . _sister_?

She notices Pietro— _Peter_ —Pietro— _Peter_ first. Of course, she does. It’s natural reflex. She would always seek him first and foremost.

He’s younger, baby fat padded his cheekbones. The hair, immensely flint-hued, is a mess, nearly touching his slumped shoulders. That cheeky grin. His eyes are a peculiar sort; they’re still cinnamon-brown, holds the same mirth in the Pietro she’s come to known but none of his sadness.

The woman is far older now than the girl in polka-dot dress. Yet she cannot be older than late thirties at most. Tatiana Maximoff, the name sparks no familial recognition.

(Nevertheless, a blood-forged connection shimmers under her skin, even if this woman is a stranger, an ersatz replication of her own mother.)

Her sunken eyes are golden-flecked hazel, lined with black kohl. Painted with smoky-blue make-up.

(Wanda searches her own memories for her mother’s portrait. Finds none. Did _majka_ paints her face the way Tatiana did? Did she have hazel eyes freckled with gold, or were they jade stones that glimmered? Pietro’s voice phantom-whispers,  _they’re not blue, so as father’s eyes_.)

Tatiana wears her wavy, titian hair loose over her shoulders. It’s bouffant on top, bangs combed to the back. _Disco hair_ , Pietro ghostly snorts.

(Marya loves braids or is her crow-hair weaved into her usual loose bun? Her own mother’s face is a ghost-image that awakens no fondness within Wanda. Perhaps Marya Maximoff resembles Tatiana greatly, perhaps she doesn’t. Between her and teal-eyed Pietro, her twin appointed himself as the keeper of painful memories. She cannot ask him for confirmation now.)

There is a little girl sitting on Tatiana’s lap, aged seven or so. There is no counterpart for this girl in Wanda’s life.

(Could she be a sister Wanda would have if the Stark-imprinted shells never fell? Wanda isn’t keen to find out. That future is snatched from her. It only opens old wounds.)

She cannot be the _sister_ Pietro—Peter admitted once. Far too young. This isn’t his twin . . . staring at the child, with her auburn hair in Wanda’s shade, with her mischievous leaf-green eyes—it’s like staring into _her_ reflection. Her glance lasts the shortest, and she turns away from further examination.

Wanda likes to think she bear some resemblance to Wendy Maximoff. But she isn’t. The girl standing next to Pietro—Peter is a mirror image distorted beyond comprehension.

(There are a thousand emotions and a million thoughts all swirling within her mind. Curious, envious, and sixteen synonyms for the word ‘bizarre’. The stark differences between Wanda and Wendy is enough to make her head spins in an ouroboros loop.)

Wanda’s wind-swept hair isn’t loose-curled or flaxen. Wendy’s hair is.

Wanda’s ashen skin isn’t sun-kissed. Wendy’s skin is.

Wanda’s face isn’t nicked with a short scar slightly above left eyebrow. Wendy’s face is.

Wanda’s green eyes will never be Wendy’s winter-blue.

(What was it _majka_ or _baka_ called Pietro? The ocean-eyed Maximoff. Rare jewel for the green-eyed Maximoffs and moss-eyed colouring of certain Maximoff family branch. Pietro—Peter’s Maximoff seems to obey that blueprint.)

Wanda laughs. Hard. Loud. She laughs. Laughs. And laughs until the hilarity is gone and all she has are salty tears. The universe is enigmatically funny—and terribly _weird_. And perhaps wholly invested— _obsessed_ even—with the notion of a blue-eyed Maximoff.

With that, she heads for the library. Or what passes for a library, a storage of memories. The room is wide as an amphitheatre for an audience of a hundred. The walls are lined up to the ceiling with shelves of videotapes.

There are titles and dates on the spines of the videotapes’ casings, written in the sloppy scrawl of Pietro’s handwriting. She starts from the 1970s, fingers through a collection until she reaches one titled ‘Age of Apocalypse’—and subtitled beneath it; _Fuck! Almost Died, Met Dad Finally_.

She pulls the tape out. Looks for a VCR around the room. Spots one on a metal table, by the door she came in. A thick television anchored to another counter, next to it. She binds her scarlet to the library’s walls, insulating the room from triggering his real-time response to the nightmares. She pops the tape in. And waits.

The video starts to his internal monologue, summarising the haze-painted voyage bringing him to a sleek slate-coloured jet. She sees people appearing, wholesomely pixelated and riddled with graininess, decked in ink-flint uniforms.

Their features are passable. Wanda though squints for a better look. The footage doesn’t improve, her patience runs ice-thin. This won’t do. But this isn’t real world. This is Pietro—Peter’s mindscape. Rules are illogical and intangible.

She moulds the library into a vast endless space, encased with fluorescent snow-white light. The tape—the _memory_ —melts into the floor, dissipating like steaming ice-glacier. Soon the white space morphs into a war-ravaged landscape.

It does not feel any American in its dilapidated earthen homes, or in the grey-streaked sizzling magnetic skies. Too much that reminds her of ruined wreckages of Novi Grad. Down to the dust-coated debris littering the ground—so sparse with vegetation. Egypt. Arabic sign spelt ‘Cairo’ torn from its twisted metallic stand, imbedded on a rusted Volkswagen’s roof.

His emotions erratically convulse through the memories, oozing through her scarlet shield. Seeps into her scarlet, into her veins.

(Adrenaline tainting her own blood stream. Heart beats to fear’s tunes, rising and thumping against her ribcage like hammer pounding on anvil. _You’re an observer_ , she reminds herself. This is not real. She’s in control.)

Wanda surveys the ruined terrain. Fragments of Cairo woven into brand new pyramid, an aberrant parody of ancient monument forged by human ingenuity. The man— _monster_ —responsible for such desecration is violet-skinned, and his forehead sullied by jagged transversal markings.

She _knows_ him.

_Of_ him.

The bogeyman of Pietro—Peter’s nightmares.

He is not a huge man, not the likes of metal-limbed Ultron. His shadows lay colossal, darkening everything and anyone in his path, crescent eclipse on a bright noon.

Her frost-haired lover whizzes, unseen and smug. Dolling sped-laced punches at the blue-faced monster. Unflappable in his invisibility. Relishing in the shockwave of his concealed hits, blithe determination bolsters his fearless streak.

The scene shifts, abrupt. The dauntless bravery drains from his porcelain face; his leg entombed by the ground, sprung up by the man-like monster. Comes the splintering of bones into shedload biting shards, echoing within her blood rushing in her ears.

Her twin-lover is helpless, not more than a collateral damage in the monster’s zealous pursuit of a telepath, far, far greater than Wanda’s mind. Charles Xavier. The white lamb with his pale neck bare and vulnerable to the slicing katana.

She feels the speedster’s fear quaking in his chest to his fingertips. Panic, terror, and all the consuming pain, spike feverishly the way Geiger counter spins frenetically over high radiation.

(The scarlet link, entwining over Pietro’s silver-blue sparks, _withers_ faster than she could comprehend, could digest the wicked truth. The one she forged since their bodies were dissembled and remade into flesh and bones imbued with new perilous gifts, connecting her mind to his every day, every hour, every second and there are no secrets between one soul inhabiting two bodies. It’s maddening. It’s blasphemous. The Maximoff nexus _disintegrating_ into dust, slipping between hysterical grasping scarlet tendrils; the bright blue-silver flashes _dimming_ , as his hummingbird heart _dwindling_ to its last tick, and the ever-bleak raven snaps its wings open—an ill omen and the horrendous silence buzzing after.)

Wanda screams. And screeches. And wails. And the knife keeps dreadfully twisting in her chest.

Tears fall.

The world turns black.

* * *

The thought of him surrendering himself to the prodding of a telepath, isn’t one Peter would enthusiastically entertain. Ever. Here he is. Lying flat on his back, his head on her lap and his jacket as a makeshift pillow. At the mercy of his midnight paramour.

He has questions, yes. Doubts too. Of the things he lost to occasional absentmindedness. Of the secrets he’s tucked in the deep vaults of his mind. So many things she could stumbled on—steal away.

But, but, but Peter has blurted many secrets before. Always to Wendy. Always to Scarlet at his most wretched hours. He doesn’t regret his impulsive blunders.

Truthfully, Scarlet has his utter trust and all the faith he has to give. The kind he reserves entirely for Wendy, and his twin sister alone.

Peter tries. With the fleeting attention he’s born with. To clear his mind. To not think. Meditate.

With the quietness, the gears in his mind shift, churn out half-formed thoughts. One second, it’s the worry of blue-furred Hank out on a night stroll. The next, he frets over his classes and assignments. Then, Scarlet and her silence snag his heed in clenching jaws.

Water droplets blot his brow, nose, cheek, chin— _rain_? He sneaks a peek at her.

Tears.

_Oh_.

Her cat-green eyes glimmering in disconcertingly garnet.

Peter’s heard screams before. Tiny squeal of hunger by a toddler. The frustrated yell of pent-up rage. The cry of a relationship ending one-sided. The shout of a worried parent.

But not _this_.

Rasping throat unleashes a banshee’s howl, splintering heart into glass shards, detonating eardrums into ruptured bleeding dams, curdling blood in riverine veins.

Scarlet collapses.

Peter’s quick to catch her, long before her head sways, dangerously tipping, degrees away from crashing on the grass. He blitzes through the darkness-tinged green, Scarlet secured in his arms. Guided by fright-fashioned engram, he reaches a timbered cabin, in the deepest heart of the Westchester forest.

The cabin isn’t his obviously, consumed by time and careless abandonment. Two storeys of rustic logs, built in the sprawling land of the illustrious Xavier Clan, he recalled reading on the cabin’s heraldic tapestry hanging over the fireplace’s mantle.

His intentions aren’t fuelled by malice or childish loathing. Trespassing, unlawful breaking and entering are all by-products of a rather unfortunate turn of events. Really. Peter swears, crossed his heart and all that.

(Still, it’s a crime. One of many he’s committed. Peter makes a mental reminder for the broken locks. Surely, the promise to replace the padlock with industrial grade lock would erase his cache of misdeeds.)

He lays her down on the cedar-bounded sofa, wary hands fluff the pillow long before she thumps on the ground from gravity’s pull. Quilted curtains, heavy with dust and stale air, he draws wide open; crisp autumnal breeze eagerly fills the cabin’s space.

He occupies the time, humming to a whimsical tune, and springy steps darting across the room. The domesticity of ragged apron tied around his waist, rubber gloves snug on his restless fingers and the newly acquired vengeance for mothballs and filth, doesn’t bother Peter.

(He’s lived in a house of two. Dusks and dawn bleed into one long night, and there is no sober soul in sight, except of the man of the house. The burden of caring an alcoholic is far loftier than to chase after a self-flagellated sinner, Peter thinks.)

The dented, old-fashioned kettle sings tuffs of steam, when she stirs; Peter kills the fire, pours the sizzling water into two mottled tin mugs and rattles the canned container half-filled with cocoa powder.

Scarlet groans, parched lips beckoning attention.

“Hey, you’re awake—” Words die on his lips. A rusted hunting knife is jaggedly cold against his throat.

(He cheats a little. Moving at cheetah speed, he dumps generous amount of cocoa into the mugs and sets the mugs safely on the cratered counter, before he surrenders his hands up.)

Scarlet bolts up, her spine rigid and hissing. Her face is an impressive expression of blank and overt apprehension. Her eyes are not green, but sparklingly crimson.

The blade is pressed forebodingly under his chin, not enough to break skin. “Don’t shoot— _slice_ , maybe.”

_Recognition_ clicks, and clarity dissipating the glow of her eyes. “ _Pietro_?”

“Yup, me. Pietro.” He cracks a smile. Yet his hands linger in the air, and he pouts. “Call me ‘Peter’, _please_.”

The knife clangs unceremoniously on the floor. Her eyes are wide as car lights shone onto deer’s petrified eyes. Her apologies are horror-tipped, tremors in remorseful utterances.

“Meh, no sweat. I mean, it’s not like I can’t avoid it,” he says, shrugging bony shoulders. “Hot chocolate?”

Her mahogany curls tumble in acquiescing nods. “Thank you.”

He brings his own mug to his lips, blowing the rims. “So, tiny bit warning. It’s hot. And gonna taste a little funny. This cabin hasn’t been restocked like in centuries.” He waves his free hand absentmindedly around the room.

Scarlet sips a small gulp, cradling the mug gingerly with ivory-white hands. She gazes at her fiddling hands, almost transfixed by the browning marshmallows. “Where—what happened?”

“I know the guy whose family owned this cabin,” he replies, wincing at the senseless admission of another felony. “Oh, you _fainted_.”

She is silent, unblinking.

The quietness is perplexing. The kind that creeps down his spine in crawling footsteps, heart clattering around his ribcage as he stumbles around, trying to grasp an out-of-reach answer. If Peter stares, sees, and looks—he wonders if he’s the one to chase her sorrow away.

(There is always something heart-breaking about her, Peter thinks. Under the kerosene-fuelled lamp, she is a thousand times brittle in the half-shadows and Peter wants nothing more but to lean forward, brushing his lips against hers, thumbs away the salty crystal clung to her lovely lashes.)

He coughs too loud onto his fist, at the sudden recollection of playboy magazines sprawled over his bed, clumsy coupling and childlike embraces. “If you’ve seen any homemade porn collection—” he rambles, sheepish and wholly apologetic, tapping his temple, “—I am deeply sorry about that.”

“Not your indiscretions. I just—just lost control. Sensory overload.” She forcibly chuckles, takes another gulp of her chocolate. “How long?”

“For me, felt like forever,” he sighs, dramatically backhanded his forehead. “But you, minutes probably.”

“Come and sit with me.” She pats the space on the sofa, scooting to leave him a wide space.

He obeys her, without a resisting thought. Sliding next to Scarlet, he leans against the sofa, tilting his chin towards the ceiling, and nimble fingers fiddling with the quilted blanket. There is a nagging question swirling within him. He knows a scarlet falsity, much like when Wendy lies and Peter just knows. The dried tear marks on her cheeks and that haunting shriek—what did she see?

Scarlet reclines over his lap, her folded arms act as pillow. “You never told me you have a sister,” she mutters, her Baltic accent thickens and fissured for a fraction of a second.

Peter detangles her locks with his fingers. “I think I mentioned Wendy a couple of times.”

“Not Wendy. She’s younger. Green eyes.”

“Ah. Half-sister that one. Her dad’s American, you know. Pretty groovy guy. He fixed fast cars. Bought my first Twinkie.” He twists her hair into the fishtail-like braid Talia favoured, expertly and professionally neat. His legs vibrate absentmindedly, anxiety humming within his veins. “But she’s like me and Wendy. He died when she was two.”

(He cannot remember the last time Talia is uttered in casual manner; Wendy refused to even visit that tread of their shared past and Mum was slightly better, periodically gazing at Talia’s portrait in her drunken stupor and smiles—but Peter knows it’s been far too long. And this time, it doesn’t hurt as much to speak of her.)

“Is Wendy studying in that special school you’re staying?” Scarlet turns her gaze at him, a smile tugging the corners of her lips.

“Nope. Tried to get her to come. Wendy’s stubborn, can’t change her mind even if I want it so badly.”

The smile diminishes into a troubled scowl. “Where did she go? I cannot imagine being apart from a tw- _sibling._ ”

Peter sighs. “Everywhere. Anywhere.”

She sits upright, nearly smashing into Peter’s lowered face. “You’re a sphere of surprises,” Scarlet declares, her pale fingers affectionately cupping his face.

“ _Ball_ of surprises,” he corrects, and lips bearing the biggest grin he has, “I like to think that I’m the Swiss knife of the X-Men. Ya know, brain, beauty and brawn.”

“I see no reason not to believe otherwise,” she agrees.

He tips his head at the window’s direction, sees the golden-rimmed dawn peeking through the curtains. “I think you should go back—sun’s getting high. I hate to see you burst into flames.”

She presses her lips against his, kisses Peter a sealed promise of everlasting love and peace. “I will return. You will not get rid of me that easily.”

Peter puckers a duck’s pout, snatches another chaste kiss from her. “Give Count Dracula a kiss for me.”

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17164043).


End file.
